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Tobacco!
     
    So saying, Augustus angrily bit off a large chaw of Cairo Cut Plug. It was a huge bite, more than he could chew. Somehow Augustus sucked some of it back into his windpipe and began to choke.
    The other board members looked at one another. No one moved. We’ll never know why they hesitated. Did they want him to choke? Or were they simply afraid to step up and slap him on the back?
    Either way, from that day forward, Augustus Badcock was no longer an obstacle to progress.

Lord Chamberlains
     
    Augustus was succeeded by his nephew Horace (“Boomer”) Badcock, a man with more experience of the modern world, and especially of the Great Depression. As a young man, Horace took a summer off and tramped the country. He lived the life of a hobo, riding the freight trains, standing in soup lines, sleeping outdoors – and drinking antifreeze. “I wanted to get in touch with real people,” he explained later. The episode earned him the nickname, “Boomer,” which he bore proudly the rest of his days.
    Horace felt he knew what ordinary people wanted in a cigarette, namely an escape into elegance. “They don’t enjoy living in dirt, and poverty, and ugliness,” he said. “They want beauty and sophistication. They want class and plenty of it. We need to make our products as exciting as the movies. When people light up, they ought to feel they’re sharing in the lives of the famous, the glamorous, the wealthy. They ought to feel it’s like sipping that first martini.”
    He rehired the advertising department and cautiously endorsed the new campaign. The company prepared to launch a new cigarette with an English name.
    The name itself was a problem. A number ofEnglish names were considered and rejected, for various reasons. Some were too hard to pronounce (Cholmondely, Leicester, Featherstone-haugh). Some simply had a comical sound (Stoke-on-the-Wold, Horsleydown, Cuthbert Harrowing, Wrangthorn, Plimsoll). Some sounded faintly risqué (Marquis of Bath, Knight of the Garter, and Lord Privy Seal).
    The final choice was
Lord Chamberlain
, a name sufficiently aristocratic, suave, and worldly. No one knew that, in Britain, this was only the title of a dull official whose chief job was censoring plays. In America the name itself would play well –on Broadway or anywhere else.
    The drift of the campaign was clear in magazine ads from prestigious 1930s magazines like
New Yorker
and
Vanity Fair
. Each ad featured a glittering aristocrat.
    In one ad a society lady is shown in two poses: in aviator suit, climbing from the cockpit of her own plane; in evening dress she welcomes guests to a dazzling dinner party. Always and everywhere, she smokes Lord Chamberlains.
    “I serve them to my guests between courses,” she explains. “Nothing aids digestion like Lord Chamberlain.”

    “For a recent dinner party at our house in Newport, I really depended upon Lord Chamberlain,” she says. “I serve them to guests after every course – everyone knows they aid digestion – and they make the conversation flow and the occasion simply sparkle.” She laughs. “My friends are all sold on Lord Chamberlain. It’s the modern thing to do!”
    Lord

Chamberlain –

It’s the

Modern Thing
to Do!
    To the rest of the world, she’s the Baroness du Champs-Elysée , very much a part of the glittering haut monde, dashing back from an Alpine skiing holiday to catch the New York season, before she flies her monoplane out West to visit her rancho. Then it’s off to Deauville or the south of France.
    But to her friends, she’s just Sally, the fresh-faced, girl who’s always ready for a lark – like going to Harlem in sables and pearls. And when she smokes, it’s always
    Lord

Chamberlain

    Another ad shows a tall, slim man in full evening dress, under the canopy of a Harlem nightclub. He wears a bright scarlet-lined cape and a bright blue order (the color reproduction of the time could not manage much more than red or blue). His hair