Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

by Josh Ozersky

  And make no mistake: he was their chief asset. As Brown says, “The Colonel wasn’t just the face of the company; he was the company. I used to tell people inside the company, there’s two reasons we’re all rich: because the Colonel came up with a good product, and because he looked good on that sign.”11 For Brown, the Colonel was more than the face of the franchise; he was almost mythic. “He wasn’t just a trademark. He wasn’t just somebody that an adman had made up, like Aunt Jemima, Colonel Morton, or Betty Crocker. He was a real, live human being and a colorful, attractive, persuasive one. My job was to get him before the American people and let him sell his own product.”12

  With the Colonel established as a living mascot, a flesh-and-blood Uncle Ben, Brown was able to mobilize his peerless sales ability to get more and more franchisees signed up. Brown was done with having Kentucky Fried Chicken be an item on someone else’s menu. Now every restaurant would be a freestanding one with identical signage, architecture, and maximized efficiency. And every one would be built from the ground up with an eye toward take-out. This innovation was currently powering McDonald’s to unheard-of success, the hamburger company having ridden the postwar baby boom to glory. The prosperity World War II brought to the country produced an unprecedented demographic explosion, and an expanding “crabgrass frontier” of new suburbs was coming into being. Those suburbs were largely occupied by young families of exactly the kind that might need a bucket of chicken for dinner one night a week or even more than one night a week.

  Another thing about these families was that they all had cars; that was how they could live in the suburbs, why suburbs existed. The new Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets that Brown had in mind would, like Pete Harman’s operations in Utah, be totally dedicated not just to fried chicken but to the Colonel’s brand. They would feature the Colonel’s “mug” as the central visual identity of the place, with every element from a red-and-white color scheme to a mansard roof with a rotating bucket overhead dedicated to beaming his image to everyone within visual range. But unlike Harman’s restaurants, they wouldn’t be primarily urban affairs catering to a dine-in clientele. The Colonel’s daughter Margaret, who owned a hereditary title to all franchises in Florida, started the first one, in Jacksonville, and it did so well that it became the template for future operations. Why not? It was so cheap to have a take-out restaurant: no waiters, no big building, no dishwashers, no linen—just chicken in boxes and buckets, and plenty of it.

  Now the Colonel was rich at last, rich beyond his wildest imaginings, and he had a license to spend all his time “coloneling.” The white suit went on for good sometime in the early ’60s. Slowly but surely the country began to learn about him. Duncan Hines notwithstanding, he wasn’t well known on a national level, not yet. Kentucky Fried Chicken, for one thing, was still a regional chain. For another, there were still no plans to start doing national TV advertising. At first, there was no paid advertising at all. The Colonel got it for free by appearing on talk shows.

  In the Colonel’s first national television appearance he was still so obscure that he was chosen as the Mystery Guest on a 1963 episode of What’s My Line?, a popular quiz show of the 1950s and ’60s. The panelists on the show were allowed to pose a certain number of broad queries that if insufficient would lead to a cash prize for the guest. Naturally, no prominent public figure would be invited as the guest. The Colonel, in full whites, appeared before the panel, which asked him such baffled questions as “Is your product anything I might use?” (Arlene Francis), “Is your product a fruit or a vegetable?” (Dorothy Kilgallen), and “Is it ever used in connection with that marvelous drink, a mint julep?” (Martin Gabel).

  The panelists were unable to puzzle out what the Colonel made and appeared skeptical when he described its finger-licking-good qualities. “How many spices is it . . . ?” host John Charles Daly asked the Colonel, and the guest had a ready answer. He inserted a quick statement about nine hundred restaurants and “a patented frying method” and wrapped up, all in the same breath, by telling the viewing audience, “Wherever you see a picture of this mug of mine, you know you’re going to get good food, at least good chicken.” There was polite laughter, and the Colonel was sent on his way.

  Watching the clip today, one can’t help finding it somewhat surreal. How is it possible that the panelists had no idea who Colonel Sanders was? (A similar question on the other side of history hit KFC in the form of its 2010 survey.) The answer is obvious, in retrospect; he wasn’t on TV yet. Not that the highbrows who cross-examined him would have watched much TV in any case or admitted to it if they had. But when a short time later “the Colonel” became universally known, it was neither because of the excellence of his chicken nor his “mug” on signs from coast to coast. No, the engine of his fame, of almost all fame in America at the time, was television. And the Colonel turned out to be a natural for TV.

  Other spots and cameos followed. Brown, showing a prescient awareness of the power of television, brought in Stan Lewis, a Madison Avenue ad executive, to get the Colonel into the public mind. In 1967 the Colonel appeared in two not-so-memorable movies—as an irate customer who bangs his cane on a hotel desk in Jerry Lewis’ The Big Mouth and as the owner of a fried chicken restaurant in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blast Off Girls. A few years later Sanders would appear in two even worse movies, The Phynx and Hell’s Bloody Devils, as himself.

  On the small screen he was a regular presence. He appeared on The Tonight Show with a box supposedly containing his two million dollars. On Merv Griffin’s show an actor walked up and down the aisles looking for “that Colonel that stole my wife,” and when the man found the Colonel, not at all inconspicuous in his white suit, his quarry high-tailed it down the aisle followed by ushers carrying buckets of chicken, which he then proceeded to hand out to the crowd.

  The Colonel was a big hit on television, much to the surprise of Stan Lewis, John Y. Brown, and everybody else. It was conceivable that he would get nervous, flub his lines, or otherwise flinch at the thought of appearing before so many people at once. Also, everyone was aware that the Colonel, despite his vitality, was an old man: by the time of his first appearance on What’s My Line? he was already seventy-three years old and looked like the guy on the bucket. But as they found out, he was able to adopt his lifelong sales gift to the camera without too much trouble, even to the extent of impromptu joshing around with various talk-show hosts. He wasn’t the gifted performer some of his hagiographers make him out to be; at his best the Colonel was a somewhat wooden performer, albeit a likable one.

  By 1969 his TV persona was well established and perfectly presented in a commercial. The viewer peers through the window on a rainy night to see him seated in a rocker with a little girl on his knee. “I’m Colonel Harland Sanders, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about my Kentucky Fried Chicken,” he says in a quick, clipped monotone. A prim young woman in an old-fashioned blouse affixed with a cameo says from the dining room, “Ain’t you coming?” As the Colonel sends the little girl along, saying, “You go ahead, honey, I want to talk to these folks a little bit longer,” he has launched headlong into his practiced patter. “Now there’s only one way to cook Kentucky Fried Chicken, and that’s my way. We always use plump young broilers, always fresh, never frozen. [Cut to images of the children eating chicken pieces and licking their fingers.] Each piece is dipped into an ‘egg warsh’ and then seasoned flour [Dad takes a bite] in which we have the eleven different spices and herbs for flavor.” Then, without pausing, he says, “One more thing, folks: it’s the only way you’re ever going to get chicken that’s finger-licking good, and I’d be mighty proud to have you try Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken. Mighty proud.” He rises from his chair. “Now excuse me a minute, please,” he says, shuffling off toward the dining room, where his red-haired, cameo-wearing daughter, an older version of Wendy, is licking her fingers. The sight finally rouses the somnolent Colonel from his trance, and he becomes, for the first time, animated: �
��Hey, looka there! Didn’t I tell you it was finger-licking good? Heh heh heh,” he laughs, walking with his cane toward the table. A melodious baritone rolls over the scene, singing “Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you want Kentucky Fried Chicken, you’ll have to visit me . . . ,” and the words “Visit the Colonel” appear at the bottom of the screen.

  The message is clear enough—the Colonel represents old-time values. He’s bathed in the warm light of a fireplace, the familial hearth keeping his kin warm on a cold and rainy night. We come in out of the rain to see him; as the commercial begins, the camera is very much on the outside looking in. “Yes,” it seems to say, “you live in a grossly inhospitable modern age filled with Vietnam, hippies, and skyrocketing meat prices—but there’s still room for you here at the Colonel’s table.” For one thing, the spot misses no opportunity to remind us of the Colonel’s role as a living bridge to that antebellum idyll and ourselves. He’s physically between us and the Sanders family (with the chicken keeping them all together). And he’s addressing us with familiarity (“I want to talk to these folks a while longer”) even though we’ve just met (“I’m Colonel Harland Sanders. . . .”). All his talk of plump broilers and “egg warsh” is merely a distraction from the main attraction, which is the sight of the family all eating fried chicken together in a genteel setting, licking their fingers as they do so. The Colonel even shares a laugh with us over it at the end; it’s as if we’ve somehow bonded with him.

  It’s the end of the commercial that most underscores just how important Sanders was to the whole enterprise. Up until the last shot of the commercial, we’ve existed entirely under his spell in a carefully art-directed vision of antebellum comfort. Colonel Sanders was the main thing Kentucky Fried Chicken had going for it. As the exterior shot shows at the end—of a big Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant surrounded by a parking lot—nothing about the product could be further from this sentimental scene. Kentucky Fried Chicken was the cutting edge of a new kind of restaurant deliberately created to sever all the last bonds between private and public dining. Minimal options, no servers, a stark space without even a shred of linen, and a business completely geared toward speed and take-out orders via a battery of high-tech pressure cookers—that was the reality of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was the power of the Colonel’s image to coat this pill in the sentimental signs of the Old South, of hospitality with a human face. That is part of what makes the transition from the real Colonel to the illustrated face rotating atop a tower such a profound juxtaposition. In future commercials, great pains would be taken to make Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants look almost as friendly and warmly lit as the fantasy home featured in the commercial.

  Of course, the real life of Kentucky Fried Chicken was far from a family business, either in fact or in spirit. The initial public offering, ennobled by the Colonel’s presence on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, was an enormous hit. He bought the first hundred shares of Kentucky Fried Chicken at ten dollars a share and after a series of splits found himself selling them at a whopping four hundred dollars a share. Everyone wanted a piece of the new chain, and, at least at first, the confidence did not seem misplaced: within two years the chain opened more than 1,000 stores, 861 in 1968 alone, and brought in over $100 million in total sales.

  The effect on Kentucky Fried Chicken’s infrastructure was a kind of irrational exuberance. Twenty-one employees were made “instant millionaires” as a result of their stock holdings, and nobody, including even John Y. Brown, had the slightest idea how to run a multimillion-dollar, transnational corporation. The general feeling seemed to be that they had “made it” and that they ought to just keep the money coming in by opening more Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants.

  The executives “became a bunch of prima donnas,” Brown recollects, adding that his wife at the time urged him to fire everybody.13 But firing large sectors of the staff just as they had accomplished a great feat after much labor, endless hours, and great personal sacrifice was no more Brown’s way than it would have been the Colonel’s. The plain fact was that Brown, every bit as much as his goodwill ambassador, was an accidental traveler, a sharp-eyed opportunist who happened to see a chance to do something big and tapped into the immense forces transforming America in the 1960s. A number of these have been mentioned already: the baby boom, the National Highway Act, the growth of the suburbs, car culture, and the like. A far more important one, though, and less frequently mentioned by historians was absorption of restaurant chains by big business.

  The idea of a fried chicken restaurant being traded on the New York Stock Exchange would have seemed patently insane to anyone in the 1920s, when it was understood that the proper concerns of large corporations were vast and impersonal enterprises like railroads, mining, and steel. All that changed when McDonald’s went public in 1965. It was an immediate success, splitting over and over again. As a result, soon every major chain became attractive to large corporations seeking profitable businesses to fit into their portfolios. Often these were food companies like Pillsbury, which acquired Burger King in 1967, and General Foods, which bought Burger Chef the same year. And why not? These were national chains run in the most stable, modern management methods, usually by graduates of the country’s top business and law schools. These were no longer isolated enterprises run by one or another regional mogul; they were genuinely national businesses. That was what made them valuable. But that had nothing whatever to do with Harland Sanders—or, for that matter, his chicken.

  Brown was ahead of the curve in intuiting that the business could become that big; still, its success surprised him as much as anybody. Just as Harland Sanders had been a successful but by no means iconic motel and restaurant owner in the years before fast food took over the country, Brown should have been a successful Louisville businessman with a Cadillac, a share in a thoroughbred horse, and, maybe, a fast track in Louisville politics. It was in no way through his own conscious agency that he had become the head of a giant corporation—a corporation, in fact, that had no real long-term plans and no senior management to speak of.

  Nor was Brown the sole owner. Jack Massey, the Nashville investor who had made Kentucky Fried Chicken possible by laying out most of the money, knew even less than Brown about the restaurant business, fast-food chains or otherwise, and was so unconscious of the Kentucky Fried Chicken brand that he insisted, over the Colonel’s most profane objections, that the headquarters be moved to his home state of Tennessee. Massey claimed that the move was to help attract stockholders—a ludicrous argument in retrospect. Nobody goes to Nashville to attract investors unless they are starting a country-and-western band. The Colonel, predictably, was devastated. Previously, the headquarters had been an office adjacent to his home in Shelbyville. He and Claudia had launched the business there. It was a cold, hard reality for him to face, and he didn’t take to it well. Sanders had despised Massey pretty much from the first. The move cemented his loathing. He was therefore primed and paranoid and all too ready to believe a rumor he heard that one of Massey’s people had suggested getting rid of the Colonel by cutting his pension and thus maneuvering him into quitting.14

  The idea was so absurd, especially in those boom years of the company’s success, that it’s hard to imagine it could really have happened. On the other hand, it’s not inconceivable. Sanders was, in fact, a royal pain in the ass, and his antipathy toward Massey was fully reciprocated. Still, no one at Kentucky Fried Chicken can say who the person was or what he or she might have been thinking. It may well be that someone vented in a meeting after one of Sanders’ tongue lashings that there must be some way to get rid of him. Whether the idea was ever seriously proposed, the Colonel heard about it somehow and at the worst possible time: just before he was to address the first convention of franchisees, more than a thousand of them, gathered to pledge their unity and fealty to the new leadership. When the Colonel showed up in a black suit, Brown knew he was in for trouble.

  The Colonel proceeded to excoriate mana
gement for more than forty minutes. They had forgotten the people who had made them what they were. They were squeezing the franchisees, thinking only about the short term. They were destroying the company that he and his “family” had built. The food wasn’t as good and was getting worse, thanks to their newfangled innovations and their modernization plans and their corporate plotting and moneymaking schemes. The Colonel went on and on. Massey, who was seated on his right, turned red and was burning up. Brown was covered with sweat. It was a dark moment and, really, one of the Colonel’s most ignoble acts. Massey and Brown had paid him a generous amount for his business, and he had sworn in the most earnest and solemn terms never to criticize them; now he was attempting to humiliate them publicly in the most awkward possible place and time. Whether or not he believed or pretended to believe that the company was looking to get him out by means of some sinister pension scheme, it was utterly out of character to plan out such an attack.

  Brown was especially embarrassed. “I saw everything going up in smoke,” he would later tell John Ed Pearce. “Here, in what was supposed to be our hour of victory, our leader, our symbol, had turned against us. And I knew good and well that if these people believed him, if he left us and turned them against us, our company was shot.”15 After the Colonel had exhausted his ire, Brown stood up. As he reconstructed his off-the-cuff remarks for Pearce and future interviewers (his account of it to me was almost word for word the same), this was Brown’s response: