Benton, Bowles, and Hobler formed an equal three-way partnership. Hobler, ten years older than Benton, brought his years of experience to the firm along with an aggressive, competitive edge. Hobe, as he was usually called, drove himself and his subordinates hard. The partners quickly hired new staff, many coming from other agencies, eager to join the exciting young firm.59
Rancid Oils and Coffee Nerves
The admen’s most urgent task was to revive Maxwell House sales. From net profits of nearly $3 million a year on sales of 50 million pounds before the crash, the brand generated virtually no profit on sales of 39 million pounds three years later. General Foods allotted a whopping $3.1 million to Benton & Bowles to advertise Maxwell House.
In the twenties Maxwell House had been the only brand that could truly claim national distribution. Then Chase & Sanborn, with Standard Brands’ aggressive distribution and advertising, claimed that its coffee was fresher than others. “Rancid Oil in Stale Coffee,” a Chase & Sanborn headline announced, was “the cause of indigestion, headaches, sleeplessness.” The company claimed that by avoiding other brands and sticking to its Dated Coffee, consumers could safely imbibe up to five cups of coffee a day. According to Standard Brands vice president Traver Smith, the coffee-as-a-fresh-food approach boosted sales over 300 percent in a little over a year.
Under the creative direction of Stanley Resor’s JWT team, Chase & Sanborn had begun sponsoring a twenty-two-piece choral orchestra in 1929. In 1931 they settled on popular comedian-singer Eddie Cantor, who promoted the coffee effectively.
On the packaging front, many more competitors were discovering the vacuum can, pioneered in 1900 by Hills Brothers. In 1931 General Foods introduced its Vita-Fresh vacuum pack, which purportedly removed 99 percent of the air—not just 90 percent, as with Hills Brothers, MJB, and Folgers. General Foods also installed a huge electric spectacular in Times Square. Designed by Norman Rockwell, it used 7,000 bulbs and showed a Southern gentleman drinking coffee, served by his seventeen-foot-tall black butler.
All Aboard for the Maxwell House Show Boat
Despite its new vacuum can and Times Square presence, Maxwell House continued to lose market share. In October 1932, Atherton Hobler met with the General Foods managers and leveled with them: Maxwell House Coffee was too expensive, it didn’t taste good enough, and it needed a dramatic new advertising approach. He proposed that they improve the blend by using less Brazilian and more high-grown mild beans. Cut the retail price by a nickel. And last, cut the advertising budget by $2 million, down to $1.1 million, but apply all of it to radio. It was a major gamble; sales would have to go up 20 percent just to break even, but the General Foods men were willing to try anything. Later that same month, the first weekly Maxwell House Show Boat went on the air at the unprecedented cost of $6,500 a show.
Inspired by the 1927 Jerome Kern musical (itself based on an Edna Ferber novel), the radio series reverted to the popular Dixieland Maxwell House theme, but with—quite literally—plenty of new bells and whistles.60 “Come aboard, folks,” production manager Tiny Ruffner announced as the steam whistle blew. “Your ticket of admission is just your loyalty to Maxwell House Coffee.” Then jovial Cap’n Henry took over for an hour of music, drama, and comedy.
The radio show was an enormous hit. The sound effects—surging water from the paddlewheel, the clatter of the gangplank—and acting were so convincing that many listeners believed the boat truly existed. Two thousand people waited in vain on the docks of New Orleans when the show’s script was set there.
By the beginning of 1933, Maxwell House Show Boat was the top radio show in the country, a status it would maintain for the next two years. On the January 1 show, Tiny Ruffner announced the 5-cent price cut and the improved blend. Within two months, sales increased 70 percent. Chase & Sanborn matched the price reduction in April. By year’s end, Maxwell House sales had climbed by 85 percent. Under the creative direction of Chet Bowles and Hobe Hobler, the show featured several radio innovations. It was the first show with a live audience. Rather than presenting separate, easily ignored commercials, the Show Boat cast incorporated enjoyment of Maxwell House Coffee in the script itself, complete with the sounds of pouring, rattling coffee cups, and satisfied lip-smacking. Dozens of famous guest stars appeared on the program to sip their coffee, including Bob Hope, Robert Benchley, Gloria Swanson, George Jessel, Jackie Coogan, Amelia Earhart, Dale Carnegie, Lillian Gish, and Gertrude Lawrence.61
With the success of Maxwell House Show Boat, Benton & Bowles quickly added two more radio shows, Palmolive Beauty Box and Fred Allen’s Town Hall Tonight. By 1934 their shows held three of the top four positions in radio.62 Although radio lacked the visual impact of print advertising, it could reach the one in twenty American adults who could not read, as well as preliterate children. Radio advertising was unavoidable if one wished to listen to a particular show.
Benton & Bowles copywriters took advantage of the popularity of Show Boat by featuring photographs of the actors in character in print ads, which further enhanced the illusion of reality. In 1935 Maxwell House ads offered a new twist, offering little vignettes in the form of popular comic strips of the day.
As Bill Benton later observed, “Maxwell House didn’t know there was a Depression. The chain stores were selling coffee that was almost as good—the difference was undetectable—for a much lower price. But advertising so gave glamour and verve to Maxwell House that it made everybody think it was a whale of a lot better. It doubled and quadrupled in sales.” It also helped, Benton knew, that caffeine was addictive. “Every businessman wants a product that is habit-forming. That’s why cigarettes, Coca-Cola and coffee do so well.”
While Bill Benton and his partners were convincing the American public to drink more Maxwell House Coffee, Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to sell his New Deal and instill hope in a demoralized country. Recognizing the unpopularity and impracticality of Prohibition, Roosevelt approved its repeal in 1933. Coffee did not suffer from renewed competition from legal liquor; rather, it continued, as it had in the speakeasies, to provide an illusory sobering effect for those who drank alcohol to excess.
From billings just shy of $1 million in 1931 Benton & Bowles’s numbers leaped upward: $3.1 million in 1932, the year B & B secured the Maxwell House account; $4.5 million the following year; $7.1 million in 1934; and $10 million in 1935. By that year the staff had grown to 174. Chet Bowles and Hobe Hobler bought huge yachts. Bill Benton built a Connecticut country estate.
At the height of the firm’s popularity, Bill Bowles resigned on his thirty-sixth birthday. He pursued a varied career in which, among other things, he made a fortune by buying and selling the Muzak Corporation. Chester Bowles left advertising in 1941, taking a job with the Office of Price Administration, subsequently becoming the governor of Connecticut and U.S. ambassador to India. While governor, Bowles appointed Benton to fill out a term in the U.S. Senate, where he fought against the witch hunt of Senator Joe McCarthy.
Atherton Hobler remained in advertising. He was stuck with the well-recognized name of Benton & Bowles and became increasingly irritated as his former partners began to disparage advertising. Bill Benton later observed that “the Maxwell House Coffee program was, to my eternal regret, the stimulus that changed the commercials. . . . It inevitably led to the singing commercial and all the current excesses.” He lamented that “I invented things that I now apologize for.”
Arbuckles’ and MacDougall Fade Away
In 1932 the Jamison sisters hired C. King Woodbridge, a noted “turnaround” expert, to supervise Arbuckle Brothers. In the next few years the firm tried a number of different tactics, such as raising cash by selling its Yuban brand to another company. Without national advertising, however, Arbuckle was doomed. In 1937, Woodbridge sold the business to General Foods, where Ariosa was allowed to die. A few years later General Foods bought Yuban, which joined Maxwell House as a sister brand. By the time the two Jamison sisters died in the early 1940s, the vast
Arbuckle fortune had disappeared.
When the Depression hit, fewer carefree lovers sought the Italian atmosphere at Alice Foote MacDougall’s elaborate coffeehouses. In 1930 she relinquished active control, and two years later the chain went into receivership, dragged down by the million-dollar lease. MacDougall, then sixty-five, resumed personal control. Within four months she increased business by 50 percent and repurchased the Cortile and Grand Central shops, but they never equaled their former glory, and the 1933 repeal of Prohibition proved the final straw. In place of expensive Italianate splendor, Depression-era consumers now populated the Automat and small coffee shops advertising “Nothing over 5¢.”
Lobbing Coffee Hand Grenades in Chicago
The Great Depression did not hurt the American coffee industry as a whole, though it promoted further consolidation and intensified competition. Comfortable profit margins disappeared. The big brand names continued to add market share while regional coffee companies struggled to maintain their niches. Many small roasters went out of business.
In 1936, Herbert Delafield, the chairman of the national association, lamented that although coffee had traditionally been a “gentlemen’s business,” it was being hijacked by “sharp shooting and scalping operators” who used coffee more than any other product as a “loss leader.” The idea was to offer a popular staple at low prices—or even at a loss—in order to draw customers into the store, where they would buy other products. The more innovative regional roasters managed to survive through clever advertising and loyal customers. They specialized in the restaurant-office institutional market, where local connections and special service still could compete successfully. Others roasted private-label coffee, packing it under different names so that other businesses, such as chain stores, could resell it as their own. In addition, there were “toll” or “trade” roasters, who roasted someone else’s green coffee for a per-pound fee.
Two regional roasters launched consumer brands. Joseph Martinson had built a thriving institutional business in the metropolitan New York area, supplying his high-grade Martinson Coffee to upscale hotels, restaurants, and steamship lines. In the late twenties he entered the packaged coffee field, offering only one top-grade blend for a premium price and advertising it steadily. Martinson’s great rival was Sam Schonbrunn, who produced the high-quality Savarin brand (“the coffee served at the Waldorf Astoria”). Martinson and Schonbrunn demonstrated that quality coffees could rise above the fray of commoditized price-cutting firms—a lesson that had to be relearned periodically in the years to come. They thrived during the Depression.
The once-dynamic National Coffee Roasters Association found itself outmoded and outflanked by the wagon peddlers, chain stores, and green coffee importers. In 1932 the NCRA reluctantly bound together with all the other coffee men to form the Associated Coffee Industries of America, hoping to squeeze general promotional funds from the likes of Jewel, A & P, Standard Brands, and General Foods. Yet none of the coffee producers saw the wisdom of spending their money to promote someone else’s brand. It was therefore “every man for himself,” as a trade editorial lamented.
The San Francisco family businesses of Hills Brothers, Folger’s, and MJB all expanded successfully west of the Mississippi River, with Hills Brothers commanding the greatest share of the market. In 1930 Hills Brothers boasted a cash hoard of $5 million. Having honed its approach to new markets in ninety other towns in the Midwest, the Hills Brothers sales force swung into action with military precision in Chicago in September 1930. For a few months grocers were showered with oversized postcards previewing the campaign. Then, beginning in February 1931, the company hired the Donnelley Corporation to mail half-pound vacuum-packed samples of Red Can Coffee to every Chicago telephone subscriber. They simultaneously mailed notices to over 10,000 independent grocers, announcing the sampling program. In the next few months, over 500,000 families would receive a Hills Brothers coffee gift in the mail. Within a year Hills Brothers surged past Maxwell House and Chase & Sanborn to become the best-selling coffee in Chicago, a position it would hold for the next two decades.
Despite their success in Chicago, however, Hills Brothers’ overall sales slid during the early depression years. Advertising expenses had broken over $1 million for the first time, but sales dropped from 39 to 37 million pounds. E. E. Hills reiterated the family commitment to the firm, refusing to sell out to a conglomerate.
Yet sales figures continued to erode, falling to 25 million pounds in 1932. The company clung to its old campaign, “A Little at a Time,” emphasizing the superiority of its “controlled roasting,” vacuum packing, and high-quality beans. Yet consumers continued to slip away, attracted by the cheaper bargain brands. By 1933 they were also paying less attention to the Hills Brothers newspaper ads; instead they fiddled with their radio knobs to find their favorite show, which may no longer have been Maxwell House Show Boat.
Getting the Gong and Trouble in Eden
In 1935 Standard Brands launched the Major Bowes Amateur Hour for Chase & Sanborn Coffee. Bowes introduced acts that would “get the gong” if they bombed. The J. Walter Thompson men soon modified this reliance on humiliation, stressing the positive aspects of the show and gonging fewer hopeful performers.
The Amateur Hour traveled from city to city, featuring aspiring local acts and attracting immense attention to Chase & Sanborn in those areas. The acts were varied, producing music from saws, jugs, bells, and toothbrushes. Tap dancers pounded the boards. Mimics tried to do FDR or movie stars. A young Frank Sinatra appeared on the show as part of the Hoboken Four, a winning quartet. The show allowed listeners to vote to determine the talent contest winners; ads pleaded with viewers to purchase more Chase & Sanborn Coffee so that more amateurs might make good with Major Bowes. “THEIR CHANCE DEPENDS ON YOU,” headlines asserted. “Your purchases of Chase & Sanborn Dated Coffee help the Americans win fame, fortune.” Civic organizations, retail grocers’ associations, and other groups encouraged their members to buy Chase & Sanborn. By the end of the year the Amateur Hour had become the number-one show on the air.
In May 1937, after Bowes defected to Chrysler for a higher salary, Edgar Bergen and his outspoken dummy, Charlie McCarthy, took over the pitch for Chase & Sanborn, consistently delivering high ratings in radio polls. Through Bergen’s skill and wit, the supposedly fourteen-year-old dummy often seemed more real than his master, as he sparred with guests. One annoyed critic called him “a little vulgarian, a brassy, blustering, sniggering blockhead.” Yet it wasn’t McCarthy who caused problems for the coffee sponsor, but Mae West. On Sunday, December 12, 1937, the sex queen flirted with the “short, dark and handsome” dummy, lasciviously calling him “all wood and a yard long.” Despite the fact that his kisses gave her splinters, she invited him home with her. “I’ll let you play in my woodpile,” she cooed.
Such banter was merely the prelude to a racy Garden of Eden skit. Eve (Mae West) conned the “long, dark and slinky” snake (Edgar Bergen) into squeezing through the fence to get at the apple tree. It was quite clear that the snake—“my palpitatin’ python,” as West called him—was a phallic symbol and that the struggle through the fence represented sexual intercourse.
SNAKE: I’ll—I’ll do it (hissing laugh).
EVE: Now you’re talking. Here—right in between those pickets.
SNAKE: I’m—I’m stuck.
EVE: Oh—shake your hips. There, there now, you’re through.
SNAKE: I shouldn’t be doing this.
EVE: Yeah, but you’re doing all right now. Get me a big one. . . . I feel like doin’ a big apple. . . . Mmm—oh . . . nice goin’, swivel hips.
The studio audience howled. Many listeners, however, were outraged. “Mae West Pollutes Homes,” an editorial cried in the Catholic Monitor. Professor Maurice Sheehy from Catholic University fumed that Mae West, “the very personification of sex in its lowest connotation,” had “introduced her own sexual philosophy” into the Bible. A politician read Sheehy’s statemen
t into the Congressional Record. Another senator called for a board of review “to prevent the recurrence of such broadcasts.” Frank McNinch, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, declared that the skit was “offensive to the great mass of right-thinking, clean-minded American citizens.”
Standard Brands executives hastened to apologize for Chase & Sanborn. Edgar Bergen and the irascible Charlie McCarthy survived the flap, not least because ratings soared following the racy broadcast. They continued to sell Chase & Sanborn Coffee for years—especially after a survey showed that four times as many regular listeners used Chase & Sanborn as those who never tuned in.
Other major coffees also sponsored regional radio programs. Folger’s first offered a detective serial, then a daytime soap opera. G. Washington, the instant coffee, aired Professor Quiz and His Brainbusters, featuring brainteasers. The various Depression-era coffee-sponsored radio programs, combined with an onslaught of print ads, clearly got the message across. In 1933 some 1,500 housewives were asked to name the product with the “date on the can.” Sixty-nine percent identified it as Chase & Sanborn.
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World Page 23
