European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - February 1, 1990, Darmstadt, Hesse Page 10 a the stars and stripes columns Ellen Goodman tobacco puffs should be run out of every City when Uptown went Down for the count in Philadelphia there was a solid Roar of Victory from the anti smoking Section. The Good Guys had won one. Maybe it would become a habit. The attempt by the . Reynolds tobacco company to test Market a cigarette targeted directly at african american lungs was so blatant so outrageous that the Community Rose up to drive it out. Health and human services Secretary Louis Sullivan unexpectedly weighed in. Saying a Uptown s message is More diseases More suffering and More death for a group already bearing More than its share of smoking related illness and that proved to be the obituary for Uptown. Rwjr withdrew plans to test Market the sleek Black and Gold package. Indeed the Wall Street journal asked whether the concept of tobacco targeting by race and gender was now out. And the tobacco company left Philly in an Era phys Mic state choking on its Public re lations fiasco. But before anybody wears out his or her own lungs crying Success a Small cautionary note. The tobacco companies May not be going Uptown again for a while but they continue to target the people they Call they Are after Blacks and women the younger the better As the a growth they have what is called a third world marketing strategy in this country. Consider the relatively very relatively Subtle advertising that tobacco companies use routinely without much notice. Reynolds the makers of Uptown already Sells Salms in two distinct colors under one slogan a Salem the and in Glamour features a White woman on a glistening Sandy Beach with water being thrown on her. Salem refreshes. The and in Ebony shows a Black woman in an Urban setting being splashed by water from a fire hydrant. Got it women of any color arc a particularly attractive Market for tobacco companies not just because they Are newer to smoking but because they have More trouble quitting. Let us Call them Loyal Consumers. Targeting women has gone on since the first Virginia slims and but it s become More sophisticated and More insidious of late. The Black Community finally rebelled at a Uptown. The place. The but hardly a word was heard when a super slims came out of Philip Morris last october. Slim need it be said is a buzzword to women who arc sold cigarettes called thin slim Light Long a anything but anorexic. It s a subliminal message that smoking equals weight control. Today women arc smoking and dying in More equal numbers. Lung cancer has become the no. I cancer among women. But there is no concerted leadership among women a groups to compare to the event in Philadelphia. In deed Many of the financially strapped women s organizations have been silenced dare we say bought off by the support of tobacco companies for everything from Tennis to the National women s Hall of Fame. A we arc fighting the co Opta Tion of women a leaders women a organizations and women s magazines a laments or. Michele Bloch of the year old women is. Smoking network. A notable exception is the National organization for women which under Molly Yard is financially and outs Okenly smoke free. But last fall the National women s political caucus gave an annual a Good Guys Quot award to the vice president of Philip Morris. In fairness the concern about targeting cigarettes to women or Blacks really nips at the Ankles of a larger question is it moral to promote cigarettes at All nobody would mind if they were test marketing Maytag to Blacks. We done to get irate at an and featuring women behind the wheel of an Olds. On the contrary. But cigarettes arc lethal. Legal and lethal. They have been targeted to Whites for decades. Uptown is no More sinister than the Marlboro Man. Nor is super slims worse than Joe Camel. It s Only when these destructive and addictive products Are pointed at a new target that we confront reality and rebel. As indomitable activist Greg Connelly says in sound bite style when the full spotlight is put on tobacco tacticians a like any other bacteria or virus they the messages from Philadelphia Are not in my Back Yard. Not to my race. Not to my ethnic group. Not to my gender. How much longer before we run the tobacco pushers out of every town c Boston Globe William f. Buckley Taylor victimized for a naming names a few weeks ago Hollywood residents discovered that there was no longer a building called the Robin Taylor building. Disappeared gone with the wind. Not the building itself understand. To was still there with its new owner Lorimar productions a Dallas Quot Etc. It was now the George Cukor building. Was this an attempt to say something about the late Robert Taylor the glamorous movie idol who died in 1969 Afier making almost so movies for metro Goldwyn Mayer Well yes it was. What happened is that when Lorimar moved in. A petition circulated by writer Stan Zimmerman was deposited on the desk of Lorimar executives asking that Robert Taylor s name be expunged on the grounds that he had been a a cooperative Quot witness when testifying before the House committee on in american activities in 1947 and had committed that grave sin in the moral Bible of anti anti communism. He had a named manifestly he was unfit to Adom a building in which screenwriters continued to work. Accordingly 43 years Afier his testimony 21 after his death Robert Taylor was vaporized. Now in 1947 there was much turmoil in Hollywood Over the communist question. There were communists in the screen writers Guild indeed there were communists just about everywhere and Why not we had just finished a very bloody War in partnership with Josef Stalin and Stalin was the Leader of that great dream which to be sure failed but which gripped a great Many prominent americans during the period of its hypnotic trance Over minds Given to making ideological commitments and declining to examine Evi Dence that accumulated undermining the reasons for making that commitment. In those Days the communists did exactly what one would expect conscientiously organized revolutionaries to do. They worked to extend their influence and to diminish the influence of those they opposed. During the War Warner studios had produced Quot Mission to Moscow Quot a film about the soviet Union that might have been written by the Kab a but Afier All we were partners of Moscow during that time. Metro Goldwyn mayor produced Quot song of the late ayn Rand testified before the investigating committee that the film was very simply communist propaganda. Louis a Mayer although a heatedly cooperative witness who named a dozen times More screenwriters directors and actors than Robert Taylor did declined to classify the political Content of a song of he did say that it was True that Taylor had objected to playing in the film but that such was the enthusiasm of the . Government to Sec it produced a deferment was Given to Taylor who went from com Neal Fin Venn of Iii it a an a a a ram a in. Iua Mixom a pm petting a song of Russia Quot to service in the Navy As a fighter Pilot. When Taylor a turn came to testify what he said was that communists were very Active in Hollywood and that they used Many techniques of disruption in order to further their Enterprise. Asked to name names he gave out Only three. Howard a Silva and Karen Morley actors he characterized As disrupter at meetings of the screen writers Guild without weighing in on whether they were motivated As communists. He went on to say that a third a writer Lester Cole had been identified by others As a communist but that he did not know whether this was True or not it was True. Beyond that Taylor simply expressed his disgust with the communist Enterprise and said he would not willingly act alongside a communist actor so strongly did he object to communist practices abroad. It is the thesis of the objection by the zip Merman group that merely to have named names was a morally disqualifying act. Leaving aside the question whether this is so one wonders if the same protesters Are prepared to Boycott the distribution of any films produced by Jack Warner he testified endlessly about specific communists in Hollywood Mayer who did the same thing or films in which Gary Cooper appeared or John Wayne or Ronald Reagan Robert Montgomery George Murphy or films directed by Leo Mccarcy or written by Morrie Ryskind. John Charles Moffit film critic for Esquire Magazine testified that 44 plays out of 100 produced on Broadway during the 1936-44 seasons used a material to further the communist and he gave the names of the writers who conspired to inject pro communist sentiment and analysis into these plays. It was a big fight and the communists used every weapon to distort what we now know of As the truth a weapons used by their counterparts in the soviet Union and in East Europe. Finally they failed. And now in a gesture of retroactive vindictiveness the statue of Taylor has been removed from the Public Square and replaced with director George Cukor who not Long before his death in 19s3 made a reference to his predecessor. A Robert Taylor was my favorite actor. He was a gentleman. That s rare in c uru anal pros syndic a
