Smoke and eat, eat and smoke

Thanksgiving Dinner… and then the peaceful feeling that comes from good digestion and smoking Camels!

OFF TO A GOOD START — with hot spiced tomato soup. And then–for digestion’s sake–smoke a Camel right after the soup.

THE MAIN EVENT — The time-honoured turkey of our forefathers–done to a crisp and golden brown–and flanked by a mountain of ruby cranberry jelly. By all means enjoy a second helping. But before you do–smoke another Camel. Camels ease tension. Speed up the flow of digestive fluids. Increase alkalinity. Help your digestion to run smoothly.

DOUBLE PAUSE — First–for the crisp refreshment of a Waldorf Salad–then–once again, for the sheer pleasure of Camel’s costlier tobaccos. This double pause clears the palate–and sets the stage for desert.

WHAT WILL YOU HAVE FOR DESSERT? Reading in a circle, there’s luscious Pumpkin Pie… Mince Pie a la mode… layer cake with inch-deep icing… a piping-hot Plum Pudding… and Camels to add the final touch of comfort and good cheer. For when digestion proceeds smoothly, you experience a sense of ease and well-being.

SO TO A HAPPY ENDING — over coffee and your after-dinner Camels. Enjoy Camels–every mealtime–between courses and after eating–and you can lean back in your chair feeling on top of the world.





FOOD EDITOR — Miss Dorothy Malone says: “It’s smart to have Camels on the table. My own personal experience is that smoking Camels with my meals and afterwards builds up a sense of digestive well-being.”

“THE BEST MEAL I ever ate would be a disappointment if I coldn’t enjoy Camels,” says William H. Ferguson, salesman. “I smoke Camels as an aid to digestion. There’s nothing like Camel’s to set you right.”

Good food and good tobacco go together naturally!

Right down the line–from explorers living on “iron rations” to the millions of men and women who’ll heartily enjoy a big Thanksgiving dinner–it is agreed that Camels set you right! You enjoy more food more and have a feeling of greater ease after eating when you smoke Camels between courses and after meals.

Enjoy Camels all you wish–all through the day. Camel’s costlier tobaccos as supremely mild. Steady smokers say that Camel’s never tire the taste or get on the nerves. And when you’re tired, try this: get a “lift” with a Camel!

COSTLIER TOBACCOS

Camels are made from finer, MORE EXPENSIVE TOBACCOS . . . Turkish and Domestic . . . than any other popular brand.

FOR DIGESTION’S SAKE — SMOKE CAMELS

Blogger's note. Damn. As usual, I am late for Thanksgiving, but this one (complete with full text) is too good not to post, even a few days late. It's one of the most astonishing cigarette ads I've ever seen. 

In the bad old days, nothing was more horrible than sitting next to a smoker at a banquet, or even in the same room with smokers in a restaurant. Never mind if they were corralled in the "smoking area" (ha ha). Smoke like, uh, er, drifts in the air, see? (Why didn't they know that then? They didn't want to offend smoking customers.) It doesn't matter if you blow it in the opposite direction. It migrates freely all over the room, the sulphurous stink of it ending up in your face, and there's nothing you can do to get away from it.

It had to be scientifically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that you could drop dead from cancer even from a small exposure to second-hand smoke - that it was, in fact, more deadly than the stuff you sucked in with your lips like an infant with a bottle of formula - before "smoking sections" were finally relegated to the past, along with the socially-acceptable and even expected habit of sucking on cigarettes before, after and even during a festive dinner. 

According to this yummy description, the average person sitting at the groaning board should consume FIVE cigarettes to achieve the desired "ease and well-being", not to mention improved digestion (WTF???). I just don't know where to start here. The purported effect on mood - calming you down and/or giving you a lift, presumably at the same time - is even more alarming, as if cigarettes were just an early form of antidepressant.

When I saw just the bottom corner of this ad, on Pinterest or somewhere, I thought, no. It's a parody. It just COULDN'T be real. But oh yes. It's a time machine of attitudes that I am profoundly grateful are dead. But it makes me wonder how many other horrible things we're still doing that one day will be seen as totally barbaric. Back then, if you'd pointed out to a hostess that smoking at the table makes people die in horrible agony, she'd probably claim you were spreading nasty lies. 

This will be my last vintage cigarette ad for a while, because it's getting old now. I have to stop running curiosities and start actually writing again, which is torture sometimes, but somebody might actually read it, and I must be prepared. I almost never look at my views, but today I did, and I got well over a thousand views for a piece I wrote a couple of years ago about Elmer the Safety Elephant. You never know what people might find interesting.

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Inhale. . . exhale!

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Butt Out - The Life and Death of Cigarette Advertising on Television

One of the better YouTube docs about cigarettes and the way Big Tobacco fought the truth (and won, for a very long time: "A treat instead of a treatment!").

By the way, this was produced by A & E. I used to watch Biography every day, then it trickled down to three times a week, then one, then it was on another network - then it disappeared, to be replaced by "reality" dreck. A & E no longer exists as a producer of quality documentaries.

"Do you inhale?": Vintage cigarette advertisements

Here is another of my gif /slidehows of old ads. I've wanted to do one of cigarette ads for a while now, but once I started researching, I was inundated. There are just thousands of these things out there. I found whole sites devoted to them. They had all been neatly archived according to date and type. The fascination with these things continues, so full of jaunty lies.

Cigarettes were so normalized, so much a part of culture. They were associated with sophistication (long gloves and cigarette holder), rugged masculinity ("Come to where the flavour is!"), femininity (a bride throwing a bouquet after stubbing out her Lucky), and certain psychological benefits - lifting you up or calming you down, depending on which direction you needed to be levelled. And of course, there was smoking as social ritual, a harmless and fun form of recreation.

These ads exhort you to "be happy - go Lucky!" They depict adorable babies posing questions to their Moms and Dads about their smoking habits. Doctors exhort their patients to smoke Camels, because that's what THEY smoke. More than one ad asks "do you inhale?" Women are bursting with athletic health and glee, never getting fat because they smoke rather than eat.

Did all this shit work? I mean, did people actually buy them because of this propaganda?

Must have. Took a long, long time for the public to catch on. Mad Men was actually about the tobacco boondoggle and its eventual defeat, though the show then had to go on to other things (like foreign cars that wouldn't start, thus defeating carbon monoxide suicide attempts).

I saw a documentary about all this - hair-raising, it was, because by the end of it, it turned out Big Tobacco was doing better than ever, shipping their lethal substance overseas to the Third World where smoking makes the horrors of life just bearable. This is where you see pictures of three-year-old kids smoking.

Let's look at a few of these things in detail.

Babies abound in these things, and it's puzzling. Of course they're cute, but are the ads somehow, obliquely, telling women that it's OK to smoke while they're pregnant? They DID tell women that. Also that it was OK to smoke around them. Everyone did anyway. But I find this association especially creepy because it makes no logical sense.

One of the more chilling Lucky Strike slogans was "Smoke a Lucky to feel your LEVEL best!" This usually depicted a widely grinning young woman - in this case getting married and throwing her bouquet.  But it's the fine print that makes my stomach drop: "Luckies' fine tobacco picks you up when you're low. . . calms you down when you're tense - puts you on the Lucky level." Level seems to be the operative term here, the desirable thing. Cigarettes are being used as a drug to regulate mood. Did it work? Look at the explosion of antidepressant use today. Maybe we should bring back the Leveller?

No. No! Not one. NOT ONE SINGLE CASE OF THROAT IRRITATION due to smoking CAMELS! Now I know why we're asked not to use all-caps on the internet because it makes you seem to be shouting. In this case, an official-looking man in a white coat, presumably a doctor, is displaying case studies of people who have gone and smoked their brains out for months, and STILL do not display ONE SINGLE CASE of throat irritation. "Start your own 30-Day Camel MILDNESS Test Today!" Mildness is a term you see in a lot of these ads, along with flavour. To me, sucking smoke into my lungs via my mouth and tongue just wouldn't taste very good. But I may be wrong. I can see why it might put you off food, which in these ads is considered a good thing.

Let me just transcribe the text below the photo: "A really mild, flavorful smoke that enters your mouth pleasantly cool and filtered. Embassy's extra length of fine, mellow tobaccos provides extra enjoyment plus an extra margin of protection. Try Embassy! Inhale to your heart's content!"

This is completely chilling in light of what we now know about the value of filters in protecting people from cancer. They did absolutely doodlysquat, but for decades the public was told over and over again that they filtered out "tar" and other unwanted things. This was an obvious attempt to assuage public anxiety about all those silly things the Surgeon General had been telling them, that their lungs would rot and they would end their days coughing up blood in a cancer ward.

This is another aspect of the cigarette ad: gorgeousness. Some of these are just so beautiful to look at! How could anything so sophisticated and artful be bad for you? But soft! What lie through yonder advertisement breaks? Could it be - more reassuring text?

DO YOU INHALE? Luckies "makes no bones" about this vital question. "Keep that under your hat," said the cigarette trade when first we raised the question - "Do you inhale?"

But silence is golden only when it's unwise to speak. Let others explain their striking avoidance of this subject. Lucky Strike makes its position crystal clear. . . for certainly, inhaling is most important to every smoker.

For everybody inhales - whether they realize it or not. . . every smoker breathes in some part of the smoke he or she draws out of a cigarette.

Do you inhale? Lucky Strike "makes no bones" about this vital question, because certain impurities concealed in even the finest, mildest tobacco are removed by Luckies' famous purifying process. Luckies created that process. Only Luckies have it!  "It's toasted"

"Toasted" seems to imply that the tobacco has somehow been purified of carcinogens (a word that might not even have been coined back then). Someone in the tobacco industry waved a magic wand over it, rendering it harmless. Surely the good folks at Lucky Strike, the LSMFT people ("Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco") would know best, and would never do anything to harm the public. But those ads seem to bespeak certain nameless jitters among the general population, not to mention the tobacco industry itself.

Was it the fact that 90% of heavy smokers were pulling a Humphrey Bogart or an Edward R. Murrow in their final days and gasping their last in the cancer ward? Did no one put the pieces together? But if they tried to, Lucky reassured them: pish-tosh! WE don't mind discussing the matter even though everyone else is being needlessly coy about it. WE are honest about the fact that smokers inhale. But our product is so magically-produced, with shamans sitting out in the tobacco fields moaning incantations over it day and night, that those delicate throat membranes surely won't start to ulcerate, bleed, fester, bubble, blister and turn black.

A FRANK DISCUSSION AT LAST

on a subject that has long been "taboo"

"Let sleeping dogs lie!" So said the cigarette trade when first we raised the subject of inhaling. But dodging an important issue is not Lucky Strike's policy!

Do you inhale? That question is vitally important. . . for every smoker inhales - knowingly or unknowingly. Every smoker breathes in some part of the smoke he or she draws out of a cigarette! And the delicate membranes of your throat demand that your smoke be pure, clean - free of certain impurities!

No wonder Lucky Strike dares to raise this vital question! For Luckies bring you the protection you want - because Luckies' famous purifying process removes certain impurities concealed in every tobacco leaf. Luckies created that process. Only Luckies have it! 

So, whether you inhale knowingly or unknowingly, safeguard those delicate membranes!

"It's toasted"

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It's toasted

More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette

At some point in the marketing madness that pushed cigarettes down everyone's throat, a medical note began to sneak in. Nobody is quite sure why.

Mad Men dealt with this creeping uneasiness, and the frantic efforts of the tobacco companies to stifle it and play down any possible health effects. Oh, sure, cigarettes might cause a scratchy throat, a little bit of coughing, something like that. But here's this medical-looking man, this guy with a round silver disc strapped to his forehead (and what is he, a miner or something?) telling us to "smoke a FRESH cigarette." Camels! Something fresh about Camels, no doubt about it, though no one could quite say what it was.

One ad I found, which I can't conjure up here, said, "I want a treat, not a treatment." This is an obvious denial of some sort of sneaking suspicion that cigarettes might be, uh, er, um, bad for you. The ironic thing is that if you have enough of those "treats", treatment is almost inevitable - unless you just drop dead without it.

Hmmmm! Not one single case of throat irritation due to smoking Camels! Why such strident insistence, I wonder? Who brought the subject up, anyway? Humphrey Bogart?

I only wish I could read the testimonials of those tiny figures, each gleefully holding a lit Camel. I'm sure they'd be eye-opening to read.

NOW. . . Scientific Evidence on Effects of Smoking! A doctor does this razz-ma-tazz test on a whole bunch of smokers, and concludes there were "NO adverse effects on the nose, throat and sinuses of the group from smoking Chesterfields." They don't mention the lungs.

In our house, a chesterfield was something you lay down on to take a nap or watch Another World. And that guy, you know who he is, don't you? Christ in a rowboat - it's Arthur Fucking Godfrey, whom I hoped I would never have to look at again!

But this excerpt from a report on advertising, provenance unknown, kind of says it all. At least it's a lot more logical than what we've just looked at.

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Charisma to burn

I would have to call these two my favorites from Old Hollywood. They acted the stuffings out of a part while keeping it real. And they were gorgeous: the camera ate them up.

Both of them smoked too much, but Bogie fell far sooner, in an awful sort of way, consumed. He kept smoking even after contracting fatal throat cancer. Perhaps it was a "what the hell, it's coming anyway" thing. Somehow Bette was tougher, but cancer devoured her too, eventually, until she was an unrecognizable wraith.

Our heroes flare briefly. It's always brief, when you think about it. Each of us climbs only a tiny segment of the wall (just like Harold and his fake aerial sets in Safety Last). It's hard to put any of it together. I once had the thought that if you kept going back and back, and back and back and back, through the thousands and mega-thousands and millions and billions of ancestors that spread out exponentially behind you, you would eventually reach the first cell of life that winked on out of nothingness.

We all go back to the primordial ooze. There goes the  neighborhood.

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Sex and cigarettes

How is it that when certain movies come on TV, you drop what you're doing and watch them even if you don't like them very much? Or, at least, when said movies are seriously flawed.

This happens with Now, Voyager - EVERY time. Though I know it's nothing more than a semi-intelligent soaper with pretensions of a Heroic Journey (circa 1942), there's just something about Miz Charlotte and her travail (tra-Vale?) that sucks me in every time.

Speaking of suck. From the beginning of this thing, even before Charlotte Vale the sad little rich girl metamorphoses into Charlotte Vale the sad little rich WOMAN (having been screwed  in the tropics by Gerry, the biggest asshole to come down the turnpike since Jimmy Cagney shoved the grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face), there is smoking. Lots and lots of smoking. Charlotte the repressed spinster smokes in her room, and it's a wonder she doesn't set the whole place on fire by being so secretive with her butts.

Suck, suck, suck. Just picture all those cancer cells forming deep down in the lungs. Yet in that era, sex and seduction were all intertwined with cigarettes. In this movie, smoking is more ritualized than in any other I can think of. Gerry (a carnivorous bastard happily juggling two women, neither of which can actually have him) has a charming habit of shoving two cigarettes in his face, lighting them both in a great livid explosion, then handing one of them to Charlotte like she's being granted her last wish before being executed.

Ah, those smoldering looks. He can afford to smolder because he has no goddamn responsibilities whatsoever. This is one of several things that bother the hell out me about this movie - that, and the way he is portrayed as some sort of saint when he's really just busy cattin' around from woman to woman  and blowing lots of smoke. The other thing that sets my teeth on edge is that daughter of his, Tina, a whiny, clingy sort of lamprey whom Charlotte fastens on to as a DEVICE (no less) to force Gerry to stay in her life and not chase the next piece of tail that comes down the turnpike.

Ahhhh! Gerry in that tent or wherever-the-fuck they are! Out somewhere. Anyway, they're all bundled up talking (smoking, too, I think) and there's this big fire in the fireplace, and then the fire burns down real low and the camera pans back to them and it looks like she's wearing his pajamas. This means they must have had sex. Charlotte keeps referring to it over and over again in the most coy manner possible, i. e. telling her fiance (whom she rejects, maybe because he's too nice or doesn't smoke enough) that she "must sound depraved", which she does. But when you think about it, screwing around with a married man IS a form of moral turpitude and can't really be defended, even if Charlotte takes on the noble, selfless role of Tina's quasi-mother to save Gerry's family/keep him on the string. 

But ya gotta wonder. . . are these guys smokin', or tokin'?

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"AND. . they are mild"

In case you've been wondering where I've been over the past few days (for I am sure my hordes of readers will be worried about me), I've been trying to pull myself out of a funk of non-writing, based not so much on the work itself as the miserable process of trying to get it noticed.

So I'll do something else for a change! Something besides ordering Minnie Mouse panties (size 4 - they're not for me) or out-of-print books or cheap DVD sets on-line.

Ah. Cheap DVD sets. This takes me to an orgy I allowed myself to indulge in yesterday, with deep regret later: I think I watched about a billion ads on a 3 DVD set called 1001 Classic Commercials (and I haven't even looked at Disc 3).

These weren't as fascinating as I'd hoped. I love old ads - maybe it's the reason I watch Mad Men with such fervor (that, and Don Draper's magnificent body, often depicted half-nude). The reason being, this was a very sloppily-compiled set. Ads were slapped on the discs with very little care for the quality. Ironically, the '50s ads were often in pristine condition, in the kind of crisp black-and-white I enjoy in old movies.

The ads from the mid- to late '60s were atrocious, barely discernible in the blur of neon orange. You have to wonder what happens to color film over the years, if it rots or melts or what. I skipped over these very quickly. They never should have been included.

Ads are a-spose-ta tell us everything about a culture at any particular moment. Aren't they? Women all seemed to want to look like Donna Reed, her blonde puffed helmet hard enough to repel schrapnel. One hair spray ad claimed that "your hair will still feel like hair", as if that were an aberration. Men's hair products were simply disgusting, rendering a decent head of hair into a slick of oily black sludge full of comb-tracks. Supposedly, women loved this: "they'll love to run their fingers through your hair!" Eeeiiiicccccchhhhhhhhk-k-k-k.

I didn't realize before how obsessed these early ads were with proper meals, nutrition through the warped lens of the 1950s. The words "wholesome" and "nutritious" popped up everywhere. Vitamins were mentioned constantly. There were modern-day wonders like canned zucchini (hmm, what's a zucchini?) and Tropi-Kai Mixed Hawaiian Fruits (? Probably another variation on fruit cocktail. Mmmmmm, those gaudy red maraschino cherries.)

"Eat well. . . but wisely," the authoratative male voice-over advises us. Right. Jell-o was nutritious, apparently, as was every kind of sugary cereal (all made in Battle Creek, Michigan - oh, how I remember sending away those box tops for a plastic fire engine!). This strange guy, a nutritionist called Euell Gibbon, told us that all sorts of bizarre things were edible (holding a cat-tail in his hand), then said he loved Grape Nuts. Did no one else see the irony?

No one knew how to pronounce "protein": it was "PRO-tee-an" (a term no doubt conflated - remember that term, boys and girls? - with "protean"). This was a whole different shoe size. What sort of yearning was lurking under the glossy surface? You judge.

Then came the creme de la creme of astonishing advertising: the cigarette commercial. All these had very catchy jingles, and mostly depicted young people running along beaches with dogs. "Kent. . . satisfies best," "Come all the way up to Kool", "Winston tastes good like a (bop-bop) cigarette should." This one has become infamous on the 'net because of a cartoon ad of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble smoking in the back yard while their wives slave away at the yard work. At the end of the show Fred lights Wilma's cigarette while he sings the jingle wildly off-key, and she takes a luxurious drag. The shot of Bedrock at night while the credits roll is overwhelmed by a giant sign that says "WINSTON". Can't hurt the little buggers, can it?

Camels brag that they send hundreds of thousands of FREE cigarettes to veteran's hospitals every year. Hospitals. Where most of the men lie dying of cancer? Denial was rife in the ads, constantly mentioning how mild and easy on the throat these sticks of dynamite were. Some were even recommended by doctors. A particularly tough and virile man (and most of the men were tough and virile, no pansy-ass fags here) claimed, "It's a treat, not a treatment."

Anyway, the cigarette ads put me in a stupor after a while, so I had to dwell on something else: the odd popping up of celebs, some of whom were not yet famous. Gene Wilder (his nebbishy voice unmistakeable) did two voice-overs, one for Alka-Selzer ("Ah! The blahs!"). Alan Arbus, the psychiatrist on M*A*S*H showed up. I swear I heard Mel Blanc's voice more than once (the Frito Bandito?).

The brilliant Buster Keaton, a man who worked constantly until his death at nearly 70, did a perilous pratfall backwards off a platform, making us wonder how he ever survived.

Jack Gilford did his charming thing ("When it comes to Crackerjack, some kids never grow up"). A very drunk Arthur Godfrey did a Lipton's Chicken Soup ad as part of his show (for in the past, hosts had to do the ads). "The chicken is there. You might not see it, but it's there."

After a while the whole thing was a blur of impressions, some of which I remembered from my childhood: "Gaylord, when you pull his leash he walkety-walkety-walks with you (arf, arf!)". "Mystery Date". Lucy and Desi, looking at each other fondly and smoking. Sugar Bear sounding like Dean Martin. A toy called the Great Garloo, some sort of remote-control robot on a long cord. And oh, Chatty Cathy. The doll from hell!

You can't see the angst and despair. But it's there.