Darrell Winfield as the Marlboro Man
Last month, an iconic figure in American popular culture died: Darrell Winfield, 85, of Wyoming. Most of us knew him as the Marlboro Man, the cigarette company’s noted advertising figure. He was one of several real Western cowboys who worked for the campaign.
In 1990, The Denver Post sent writer Jim Carrier in search of the Marlboro Man as a symbol of the West. He tracked down the cowboy models who posed as Marlboro Men. He visited ranches where the ads were shot and talked to ad execs and clothing manufacturers who helped create the image. He interviewed Westerners about their perception of the Marlboro Man and his impact on them and the West.
Brian Brainerd’s beautiful photos accompanied the series.
Here is editor F. Gilman Spencer, a noted writer himself, explaining the project:
January 13, 1991, Page: 1-A
The Reporter, The Cowboy, The Myth
By Gil Spencer, DENVER POST
For six months, through the pure West, reporter Jim Carrier searched for Marlboro Men, those lean riders who stared down from billboards and sold a billion cigarettes.
He also searched for cowboys who had never been within roping distance of the Marlboro campaign, but who had the look and style that gave us Shane, Wayne and those endless shoot-’em-ups that added to the myth of the Old West.
While he was at it, Carrier couldn’t help comparing himself to the leathery subjects of the piece he was about to write, to the “beggin’ your pardon, ma’am,” gun-quick western hero typified by Gary Cooper. How did Carrier stack up? Not bad at all. They ride. He writes.
Carrier was shadowed by photographer Brian Brainerd. Judge his pictures for yourself. There’s an editor hereabouts who thinks many of them could hang in the Louvre.
This was not written for a paper in, say, Boston – although there are Bostonians who would have no trouble identifying the line: “Take ’em to Missouri, Matt.”
Jim Carrier’s story was written for a paper in Denver, Colorado, within buckboard distance of Marlboro Country and the lingering echoes of the Old West.
A search for Marlboro Men and for a mythic cowhand was a Carrier idea that made exquisite sense in Colorado and anywhere else in the West, for that matter.
Now all Carrier had to do was drive thousands of miles and interview ranchers, cowboys, ad agency specialists, women who were tougher than men, men who were tougher than men, several
in-the-flesh Marlboro Men, including a gay Marlboro Man, while paying his respects to enough horses, mules and cattle to supply the National Western Stock Show forever.
He’s back. The story’s done, all eight parts. And he’s still breathing.
He feels it was worth it. An elaborate understatement. It was. Enjoy.
Copyright 1991 The Denver Post Corp.
Writer Jim Carrier
READ PART ONE, IN SEARCH OF THE MARLBORO MAN
Read the jump portion to Part One here
READ PART TWO, IN SEARCH OF THE MARLBORO MAN
Read the jump portion to Part Two here
The entire eight-part series can be found on microfilm at the Central Denver Public Library (January 13-16 and 24-27, 1991) or can be read in part, here (text only) on Newsbank’s America’s Newspapers, available under the Research tab of the Denver Public Library’s website.
On August 26, 1996, the Post published this final note from writer Jim Carrier on the advertising phenomenon that so captured the public’s imagination.
The 1991 Marlboro Man series
Death of a salesman: Marlboro Man bows out
By Jim Carrier
The Marlboro Man is finally dying – not from lung cancer, but
government regulation.
Fed up with the deaths the Marlboro Man had caused riding
across the American West, President Clinton announced rules to
hide the cowboy icon from children.
Forty-two years after his creation, the Marlboro Man will
come down from his billboards, scoreboards, doorways and
double-page spreads in Sports Illustrated.
What will the West, or America, be like, without his image,
so endemic, so ubiquitous, that he has come to stand for both?
The Marlboro Man was created in an Illinois farmhouse on a
Saturday morning in December 1954. Advertising executive Leo
Burnett had called his top creative people to his country house
to change the image of a ladies’ cigarette with a red-tip (to
hide lipstick stains) to a man’s.
Philip Morris, the fourth largest American tobacco company,
wanted to create a filter cigarette to deal with the rising
problem of smoker’s cough and lung disease. But they had to
overcome the early image of filters as being for sissies.
Sitting around a blank flip chart, with only days before an
ad deadline, Burnett asked his men, “”What is the most masculine
image in the U.S. today?”
Someone said “”cabdriver.”
“”What else?”
“”Sailor. Marine. Pilot.”
Finally someone said “”cowboy,” and there was instant
agreement. Someone drew a cowboy’s head, smoking a cigarette.
“”What would a cowboy say about smoking?” Burnett asked.
Copy writer Draper Daniels spoke: “”Delivers the Goods on
Flavor.”
In the days to follow, Burnett’s crew came up with the famous
Marlboro jingle, “”You get a lot to like with Marlboro: Filter,
Flavor, Fliptop Box,” and the most successful advertising
campaign in history was underway. Sales took off.
But it took almost a decade of experimenting with different
kinds of masculine images, to realize that cowboys had a lasting
and positive impact on consumers.
In 1963, almost by accident, Leo Burnett’s film crew
discovered the magic of real cowboys on the 6666 (the Four
Sixes) Ranch in Guthrie, Texas.
With the theme from The Magnificent Seven in the background,
ad scenes of real cowboys riding the range made Marlboro the
best selling cigarette in the world, and Philip Morris the
largest manufacturer, with cash flow to gobble up Kraft Foods
and Miller Beer.
Though the beautiful ads disappeared from television in 1971
with a broadcast ban on tobacco products, the cowboy image
translated well to billboards and magazine ads. The cowboy, so
imbedded in America’s self-image, was the perfect, positive, icon.
The tragedy is, a wholesome image with attributes of freedom
and individuality, was used to addict millions of Americans. To
the best of my knowledge, none of the leading models got sick
from smoking. A handful of some of the hundreds of those who
posed as Marlboro Men in the early ad campaign have died of
cigarette-related illnesses.
Five years ago, when I went looking for the Marlboro Man to
identify the models and the venues used in the ads, I discovered
that he had become larger than the ad campaign. He had become a
shorthand way of describing a kind of man, a kind of country,
that we secretly admired and sought.
The Marlboro Man never carried a gun. He was never mean. He
never spoke. Philip Morris kept the campaign a secret, going as
far as to airbrush out identifiable mountains. Marlboro Country
floated in the imagination. And yet, to many Americans, and
especially to people in foreign countries, Marlboro Country was
more real than Wyoming.
I met many men who created a western image for themselves
based on the Marlboro Man. I met many women who wanted to marry
him. Both were victims of layers of illusion, pasted over like
so many posters on the roadside billboards.
I’m convinced that the current lifestyle boom in the Rocky
Mountains is fueled in large part by a 33-year blizzard of ads
showing gorgeous, open country backstopped by snow-capped
mountains. Through the lean years of westerns from Hollywood,
the Marlboro Man was there, reminding us what a wonderful place
the West is.
Unfortunately, the Marlboro Man never showed scars, or
sprawl, or congestion or crime. People kept arriving, looking
for his country and creating another quite different.
The irony of Philip Morris’ secret campaign was that the
Marlboro models were all better men than the billboard image.
They were real western characters with flaws, hurts, fears. Men
you would love to be with. Unfortunately they could never talk
on the record, gagged by a contract that sought to make them
ethereal.
Frankly, I was drawn to the image and spent many years trying
to find my place on that billboard, against the template of the
perfect man. That was the power of the Marlboro Man. I will miss
him. Searching for him, I found myself.
But I came to resent Philip Morris’ use of the Western
landscape, and our most cherished symbol of individualism and
freedom, to peddle death.
Overseas, the cowboy on the billboard is not much different
than the DDT salesman after the pesticide was banned here.
The Marlboro Man borrowed a West that never was – the one we
hold dearest. We need the cowboy as hero. We don’t need him with
lung cancer.
Part Two, ‘The Great Westerners (Click on the larger image to see full size.)
