Camel Jockey

An advertising sensation of 1934 was the color photograph of Gentleman Jockey Crawford Burton, twice winner of the dangerous Maryland Hunt Cup, posing in his racing silks as an endorser of Camel cigarets' recuperative powers. By a horrible mischance, the photograph of Mr. Burton, holding his saddle and girth, reproduced in such a manner that to a prurient or imaginative eye it appeared to show Mr. Burton indecently exposed as only a man could be exposed.

When Crawford Burton, who is a stockbroker when not riding, showed up next day at the New York Stock Exchange, he found that its notoriously prurient members had so chosen to interpret his picture. When Mr. Burton entered the Exchange smoking room, he said that scores of brokers began to brandish copies of Collier's (one of the first publications to receive and print the advertisement) and set up such a gibbering that he could execute no orders, went home to seclude himself for days.

When the cruel glee of his acquaintances had subsided sufficiently to let him go out and about once more, Broker Burton, who had been ordered by the National Steeplechase & Hunt Association to turn in his amateur's license, gave his case, which he believed a likely one for libel damages, to a law firm which retained as trial counsel dapper Attorney Murray Bernays. They prepared to bring suit against the crack Manhattan advertising agency of William Esty & Co., R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., makers of Camels, and a long list of publications, headed by Crowell Publishing Co.'s Collier's and American Magazine, and including TIME. First suit to get a court decision was against Crowell, asking $75,000. A U. S. District Court threw this suit out on the ground that the advertisement was "not libelous." But Justice Learned Hand of the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals decreed:

"The contrast between the drawn and serious face [of Mr. Burton] and the accompanying fantastic and lewd deformity was so extravagant that ... it made of the plaintiff a preposterously ridiculous spectacle, and the obvious mistake only added to the amusement. . . . The plaintiff has been substantially enough ridiculed to be in a position to complain. . . . Possibly anyone who chooses to stir such a controversy in court cannot have been very sensitive originally, but that is a consideration for the jury. . . ."

Thus given his day in court. Broker Burton last week diffidently but plainly told a jury what his colleagues at the Exchange had said to him about his picture. They had. he said, asked him "how it felt" and "how much he made from renting it out." When the jury came in, Mr. Burton was not $75,000 but $2,500 richer. Disappointed, his attorneys turned their attention to the case of Burton v. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.. which is to start this week with $200,000 asked.

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