Prince of Hucksters

TAKEN AT THE FLOOD (368 pp.)--John Gunther--Harper ($5).

One day, when the officials of the American Tobacco Co. panicked in the midst of a minor crisis, the president of the Lord & Thomas Advertising Agency rose from his hospital bed in Baltimore and journeyed to New York to attend an emergency meeting. After he straightened things out, Albert Davis Lasker turned to the other conferees and announced: "Gentlemen, I have done all I can for you. Good day, because I must return to Johns Hopkins now and continue my nervous breakdown."

Patternmaker. For lesser men, the hectic pace of Albert Lasker's life would have led to worse things than an interruptible nervous breakdown. In his 44 years with Lord & Thomas (most of them as sole owner), Lasker dominated U.S. advertising and cut the pattern for its grey flannel suit. Under his influence the public was introduced to irium and Amos 'n' Andy, to Kleenex, four-door sedans and soap operas. Yet Lasker was all but invisible: almost nothing was written about him, and two blocks off Madison Avenue his name is still virtually unknown. In this fine and affectionate biography John Gunther has gone far to display Lasker for the first time.

As a boy in Galveston, Texas, Lasker was off and running before he was in his first pair of long pants. He attracted national attention as a cub reporter of 16 when he got an exclusive interview with Eugene V. Debs, the labor leader and Socialist presidential candidate. Learning that Debs, just out of prison (for contempt of court), was hiding in a house near Galveston, Lasker borrowed a Western Union messenger's uniform and delivered a wire to the stormy labor leader: I AM NOT A MESSENGER BOY. I AM A YOUNG NEWSPAPER REPORTER. YOU HAVE TO GIVE A FIRST INTERVIEW TO SOMEBODY. WHY DON'T YOU GIVE IT TO ME? IT WILL START ME ON MY CAREER. Vastly amused, Debs granted the interview, and Lasker's career moved into high gear. At 18, he went to Chicago to work for $10 a week as an ad salesman for Lord & Thomas. At 35, he owned L. & T. and several million dollars to boot.

Love That Lucky. Lasker responded with singular skill to the fierce competition of advertising. When the J. Walter Thompson Agency recommended Woodbury's soap for "The Skin You Love to Touch," Lasker fired back, on Palmolive's behalf, with "That School Girl Complexion." Working in double harness with the eccentric George Washington Hill, president of American Tobacco, Lasker converted Lucky Strikes from a chewing tobacco into the nation's leading cigarette. Cannily observing that women might be persuaded that smoking was not only decent but glamorous, Lasker assaulted the feminine market with a series of glowing testimonials from opera divas and movie queens. Luckies' sales zoomed 312% in one year.

Until Lasker's day, agencies did not write their own ads, but peddled the creations of others. But when Lasker learned that Pepsodent toothpaste contained a detergent called sodium alkyl sulphate, he ordered his own writers to rename the ingredient in three vowels and two consonants. Later Lasker delighted in saying, "I invented irium. Tell me what it is." (He never found out.) When a Quaker Oats product, Wheat Berries, got nowhere, Lasker changed the name to Puffed Wheat, "The Grains That Are Shot from Guns," and business ballooned. When Hill decided to declare war on the candy industry with the slogan "Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Bonbon," Lasker changed the last word to "Sweet" (on the theory that they might as well cut into the cake and pie business too). That, too, was advertising history of a sort.

Humanizing Harding. Lasker was too energetic and too insatiably curious to confine himself to advertising. One of his sidelines was baseball. After the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1920, he wrote a four-page code of ethics which is still the gospel of organized baseball. (As co-owner, with William Wrigley, of the Chicago Cubs, Lasker made the first big-money major-league-player purchase: he paid a sensational $50,000 for Pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander and Catcher William Killifer Jr.) He was hired by the late Will Hays to "humanize" Warren G. Harding in his presidential campaign and became the first, for better or worse, to introduce advertising techniques to politics. In the last decade of his life, Lasker shut down Lord & Thomas, and with the gentle encouragement of his third wife Mary, became a connoisseur and collector of French art, a philanthropist, and a fund raiser for medical research.

Although Gunther, as an old friend, tends sometimes to sugar-coat his product, Lasker harbored the irium of human frailty. He was fascinated with his own opinions and monologues; in one bravura performance he talked to his staff, with minimal interruptions, for three days running. He demanded utter loyalty from his employees--not only to himself but to the products he purveyed--but he was not above firing 50 men at once without qualm or explanation. In a moment of complete self-approval, Lasker once said that "there is no advertising man in the world but me." If he had studied the phrase a little more carefully, Lasker would probably have changed "but" to "like"--and hit the mark, as usual.

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