More Vanishing Cigarettes

Churchill, Bette Davis, Don Draper, and Pecos Bill.

In my last post, I highlighted some examples of attacks on cultural history represented by cigarette censorship, to wit: a cigarette taken out of the hand of Paul McCartney, and out of the mouths of Jackson Pollock and Burt Reynolds.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg for cigarette revisionism. Other examples:

--Jean-Paul Sartre. A legendary smoking icon, Sartre was no doubt rolling in his grave over the decision by the Bibliotheque Nationale of France to airbrush away his ever-present cigarette in an exhibition poster marking the 100th anniversary of his birth.

--Winston Churchill. Perhaps the most famous cigar smoker in history, the British Prime Minister suffered the indignity of having his cigar air-brushed out of the famous 1948 photograph of him making the “V” sign for victory. As you can see in the photograph above, that moment in history is no longer with us. Instead, Churchill looks like he is beginning to develop lip cancer.

--Tom and Jerry, Fred Flintstone, and Pecos Bill. Famous cartoon characters who occasionally, for purposes of satire or humor, were seen smoking cigarettes, and whose famous smoking scenes have been edited out by nervous broadcasters over the years. 

--Bette Davis. Another iconic cigarette smoker, she also ran afoul of the U.S. Postal Office (see Jackson Pollock in the post below). When the Post Office offered its Bette Davis stamp in 2008, it was inspired by a still photo from the film "All About Eve." As film critic Roger Ebert wrote at the time: “Where's her cigarette? Yes reader, the cigarette in the original photo has been eliminated. We are all familiar, I am sure, with the countless children and teenagers who have been lured into the clutches of tobacco by stamp collecting, which seems so innocent, yet can have such tragic outcomes.”

--And finally, there is the contemporary case of Don Draper of TV’s “Mad Men,” the only current television show truly obsessed with the cultural significance of smoking.  Indeed, the series opened its first season with a show called “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” in which advertising execs devised a pitch for Lucky Strikes. And the arresting title sequence that opens every show ends with a memorable black and white graphic of Don Draper seen from behind, seated on a couch, a cigarette held firmly in hand. “Bizarrely,” write Chris Harrald and Fletcher Watkins in The Cigarette Book: The History and Culture of Smoking, “this pleasure was denied to the man in the Mad Men promotional video for Season 1, when shown on Apple’s iTunes. The original image of a man seen from behind lounging in silhouette, right hand outstretched with a cigarette in it, has had the cigarette digitally removed.” (It has since been restored).

Photo Credit: CORBIS/Stephanie Schaerer

“More Doctors Smoke Camels”

The good old days of tobacco advertising.

The Transform Drug Policy Foundation of the U.K. has an absolutely first-rate collection of early cigarette advertising on display at their TDPF blog.

I’ve always been a sucker for the ones featuring doctors:

The TDPF blog calls this one “particularly awful, featuring a five year old girl proclaiming to her paternal looking doctor figure and radiant young mother that 'I'm going to grow a hundred years old'. It then goes on to inform us that ‘possibly she may - for the amazing strides of medical science have added years to life expectancy.' You can 'thank your doctor and thousands like him--toiling ceaselessly--that you and yours may enjoy a longer better life.’”

It sounds like something Don Draper and his associates might have dreamed up on "Mad Men."

Yes, toiling ceaselessly—and, one may add, perversely—to convince an increasingly wary public that popular slang like “coffin nails” and “smoker’s cough” were the results of misguided thinking.

The TDPF, in turn, found the extensive collection at Stanford University’s wonderful “Not a Cough in a Carload” site.

The exhibit is intended “to tell—principally through advertising images—the story of how, between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, tobacco companies used deceptive and often patently false claims in an effort to reassure the public of the safety of their products.”

Smoking doctors were everywhere in the ads. The Stanford site states: “Among the more reprehensible tactics was the utilization of the image of the noble and caring physician to sell cigarettes: Doctors were depicted both as satisfied and enthusiastic partakers of the smoking habit ("More Doctors Smoke Camels"). Images of medical men (and a few token women) appeared under soothing reassurances of the safety of smoking. Liberal use was also made of pseudo-scientific medical reports and surveys.”

The print ad above is lamentably undated. The collection covers advertising from the 1930s through the 1950s.

“On first impression,” says the Stanford site, “most viewers will find these images outrageous, humorous, and so blatantly false as to trigger incredulity. But tobacco industry ad men also excelled in creative genius and had high levels of artistic skill. The best talent money could buy was recruited for this effort. Tobacco advertisers faced a daunting challenge: How do you sell a product which shortens the life of the user by an average of about 8 years?”

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