Hollywood cut secret deals to promote smoking

Tobacco companies paid stars like Al Jolson, Bob Hope and Clark Gable to promote smoking as part of secret advertising deals with movie studios, according to a new analysis of cigarette endorsement contracts between 1927 and 1951.

The stars made thousands of dollars peddling cigarettes to consumers. But the analysis shows that major studios and tobacco companies reaped far bigger benefits.

In exchange for star testimonials of brands such as Lucky Strike, tobacco companies promoted movies in adverts worth millions of dollars, the documents show.

"The link between Hollywood and tobacco go back to the beginning of talking pictures,” says Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. "It was a way to thoroughly embed tobacco use in the social fabric."

Glantz and colleague Kristin Lum mined 246 documents, including cigarette endorsement contracts (made public as part of the tobacco industry legal settlement with state governments), contemporary news reports, and a collection of cigarette advertisements collected by Robert Jackler, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University.

"I was surprised that the amount of scholarship around [the advertisements] was very little," says Glantz.

'Sweet and soothing'

According to the documents, Hollywood and tobacco companies began their relationship in 1927, when an advertising firm brokered deals between two of its clients: American Tobacco and RCA. Other studios, including Paramount, MGM and Columbia, soon followed.

Between 1927 and 1951, major studios and tobacco companies partnered on at least 215 cigarette advertising campaigns, Glantz's team found.

Stars contract-bound to a single studio touted the benefits of brands like Lucky Strike and Camel in advertising agency written testimonials. "Folks, let me tell you, the good old flavour of Luckies is as sweet and soothing as the best 'Mammy' song ever written,” said Jazz Singer star Al Jolson in one such endorsement.

In exchange for the praise, Hollywood studios received free advertising for their movies.

For example, cigarette ads would mention specific movies and endorsements would be tied to their release dates. In some cases, tobacco companies sponsored radio programs featuring their pocketed Hollywood stars. American Tobacco, maker of Lucky Strikes, spent $2.3 million producing The Jack Benny Program.

The US Federal Trade Commission attempted to clamp down on the relationship beginning in 1929 on the grounds that advertiser-written endorsements misled consumers, but studios easily circumvented these rules through lobbying and carefully worded disclaimers.

Restricted access

Television, not government regulation, ended the formal relationship between studios and tobacco companies. More recently, product placements in movies have replaced overt Hollywood tobacco advertising, Jackler says.

Glantz has called on studios and the Motion Picture Association of America, which rates films, to remove smoking from youth films and restrict access to films with smoking. He estimates that such restrictions would cut youth smoking by 60% and keep cigarettes out of the hands of 200,000 youths each year.

The commercial relationship between tobacco companies and Hollywood undercuts objections to such limitations, he says.

"One of the excuses that comes out of the studios and Motion Picture Association [of America] and a lot of individuals who make movies, is smoking in the movies is an integral part of the art form itself," he says. "What this shows is that that’s not true."

Study Finds Major Shift in Abortion Demographics

The face of women who have abortions has shifted significantly in the past 30 years, with relatively fewer white childless teenagers and more mothers of color in their 20s and 30s opting to terminate their pregnancies, according to a report being released today.

In the first comprehensive analysis since 1974 of demographic characteristics of women who have abortions, researchers found that the overall drop in the abortion rate has been marked by a dramatic shift, declining more among white women and teenagers than among black and Hispanic and older women.

"There's been a real change in the picture of women who get abortions," said Rachel Jones, a senior research associate at the Guttmacher Institute, a private nonprofit reproductive health research organization considered to be one of the most authoritative sources on abortion trends. "This is the first time anyone has looked at this in a comprehensive way."

Jones and her colleagues analyzed annual data collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and by periodic surveys that Guttmacher has conducted of abortion providers between 1974 and 2004.

The analysis confirmed previous reports that the abortion rate fell to the lowest level since 1974, dropping 33 percent from a peak of 29 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 in 1980 to 20 per 1,000 in 2004.

During that period, the proportion of abortions obtained by women younger than 20 dropped steadily, falling from 33 percent in 1974 to 17 percent in 2004. For those younger than 18, it fell from 15 percent of all abortions in 1974 to 6 percent in 2004. At the same time, the proportion of abortions obtained by women in their 20s increased from 50 percent to 57 percent, and the share done for women age 30 and older rose from 18 percent to 27 percent.

Although abortion rates have declined among all racial and ethnic groups, large disparities persist, with Hispanic and black women having the procedure at rates three to five times the rate of white women.

In 2004, there were 10.5 abortions per 1,000 white women ages 15 to 44, compared with 28 per 1,000 Hispanic women of that age and 50 per 1,000 black women. That translates into approximately 1 percent of white women having an abortion in 2004, compared with 3 percent of Hispanic women and 5 percent of black women. Jones attributed that to the focus on reducing teenage pregnancy and on increasing contraceptive use.

"We've made the most important progress in reducing teen pregnancy and abortion rate, [rather] than reducing unintended pregnancy in older women," Jones said.

The proportion of all abortions performed for white women decreased from 45 percent in 1994 to 34 percent in 2004, while the proportion for Hispanics increased from 16 percent to 22 percent and the proportion for black women rose from 35 percent to 37 percent.

"We know from other research that having lower income makes a woman more likely to get an abortion. Women of color tend to be lower-income, and so in turn when confronted with an unintended pregnancy are more likely to have an abortion," Jones said.

The proportion of all abortions performed for women who already had a child increased from 46 percent in 1974 to 60 percent in 2004, reflecting the trend of women who cannot afford to have another child turning to abortion, Jones said.

The findings indicate "we need to figure out efforts to reduce unintended pregnancy, not only among teenagers but among all women, and in particularly women of color," she said. "A lot of policymakers are stuck 30 years back when most women getting abortions are teenagers and college students, and that isn't so much the case these days."

Others said the findings underscore the need to increase access to contraception for poor women.

"Birth control is the best way to prevent unwanted pregnancies," said Laurie Rubiner, vice president for public policy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "Unfortunately there's a large number of uninsured people in this country, and if you are uninsured you are less likely to have access to affordable health care, including affordable birth control."

Michael J. New, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama who works with the Family Research Council, attributed the drop in teenage pregnancies to a combination of factors, including increased contraceptive use, more teenagers delaying sex and state laws requiring parental consent.

"The states with the most active pro-life laws have seen the biggest abortion declines," he said.

King Richard II's recipe book to go online

The book is one of 40 rare manuscripts that are being digitally photographed and put on the internet Photo: University of Manchester's John Rylands University Library

Forme of Cury, which was written in 1390 in Middle English, details more than 200 recipes that were cooked in the royal household, including blank mang (a sweet dish of meat, milk, sugar and almonds) and mortrews (ground and spiced pork).

The book is one of 40 rare manuscripts that are being digitally photographed and put on the internet by the University of Manchester's John Rylands University Library.

Other Middle English manuscripts include one of the earliest existing editions of the complete Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, John Lydgate's two major poems Troy Book and Fall of Princes, and 500-year-old translations of the Bible into English.

The work, which will be carried out using a state-of-the-art high-definition camera, will begin next month and is due to be completed by late 2009.

Jan Wilkinson, the director of the John Rylands library, described the library's manuscripts as "a research resource of immense significance".

"Yet the manuscripts are inherently fragile, and until now access to them has been restricted by the lack of digital copies. Digitisation will make them available to everyone," she said.

"For the first time it will be possible to compare our manuscripts directly with other versions of the texts in libraries located across the world, opening up opportunities for new areas of research. We hope that this will be the beginning of a wider digitisation programme, which will unlock the tremendous potential of our medieval manuscripts and printed books for the benefit of the academic community and the wider public."