Marlboro Man, Without the Marlboros

It was his brother who got him started, back in the 1930s. They lived in the Helena area. Bought papers, got hold of tobacco and rolled their own. W.Z. “Herf” Ingersoll was 10 years old when he took up smoking.

He fired up his final cigarette in 1998, ending a 60-year pack-a-day habit. A bout with pneumonia that landed him in a hospital convinced Ingersoll it was time to give it up. No nicotine patches or nicotine gum for Ingersoll--”That just prolongs it,” he says. The longtime Montana rancher quit cold turkey.

“I haven’t taken a puff off one of the stupid things since,” he said.

But he’s still a Marlboro Man. That’ll happen when you spend seven years with pictures of you smoking Marlboros plastered on billboards around the world, and inside Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and dozens of other magazines.

This is the tale of a real-life Marlboro Man.

What you need to know first is that the biggest-selling cigarettes of all time, Marlboros, once were a minor brand, marketed toward women. Marlboro’s motto actually was “Mild as May.” Their filters were red, to not show lipstick stains.

Camels were king. But changes were happening that would make America Marlboro Country.

In the early 1950s, when the first reports linking smoking to lung cancer came out, some smokers felt betrayed by the established brands. Unable to quit altogether, some retaliated by switching brands. The Philip Morris Co. saw an opportunity to improve Marlboro’s pathetic market share.

The company turned to the Leo Burnett Agency of Chicago, and it handed the account to an ad exec named Don Tennant. It didn’t take Tennant long to figure out that Marlboro’s previous ad campaigns ignored at least half the potential market.

And what would make this woman’s cigarette more manly? Well, in a word: men.

William Thourlby is 6 feet, 4 inches, with deep-set eyes and a battered nose--more rugged-looking than pretty--whose modeling career consisted mainly of posing as the tough guy grabbing women on the cover of True Confessions-type magazines.

Discovered at a casting call, soon a bare-chested Thourlby, who now lives in New York City (it was a couple of later Marlboro models who would die of cancer), was pictured on billboards across America, smoking a cigarette with a vaguely familiar name.

In the beginning, Marlboro Men were not necessarily cowboys. They were lean, rugged outdoorsmen, Navy officers, pilots and, yes, cattle ranchers. But their effect was immediate: Within eight months of the introduction of the Marlboro Man, sales increased a staggering 5,000%.

The Ingersoll spread, nearly 5,000 acres, is several miles east of Lincoln, Mont. Wolf Creek is their mailing address; Augusta is where their children Ron and Janet went to school. It was in Augusta, in 1974, where Herf was “discovered.”

Ingersoll was taking tickets at the town’s annual rodeo. A photographer, Jim Braddy, who worked for the Leo Burnett Agency, didn’t have a ticket and was trying to get in. Ingersoll pointed Braddy, who was in town to scout for fresh Marlboro Men, in the direction of someone who could help.

Later that night, cutting into a steak at Bowman’s Corner, “I got that feeling you get, you know, where people are staring at you? I didn’t know if I’d done something wrong or what,” Ingersoll says.

It was Braddy’s table. The photographer was studying what he saw under Ingersoll’s cowboy hat. He approached the table, explained who he was and what he wanted. The next day Ingersoll led Braddy to a barn, Braddy snapped several frames of Ingersoll and left.

Two weeks later Ingersoll got a phone call, and the cattle rancher had a new career: modeling.

“It was the experience of a lifetime for me,” Ingersoll says.

He was whisked off to Colorado for a weeklong shoot outside a small town called Fairplay, south of Denver toward the Rocky Mountains.

“It was like that,” Ingersoll says. “One time I got a phone call at 7 a.m., by 7 that night I was in Albuquerque.”

The hours were long. Photo shoots began at daybreak, which meant getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning, getting breakfast and getting to the often remote site while it was still dark.

The photographers and models would go to work at sunup. They’d knock off about noon, then resume later in the afternoon when the light got better, and work until dusk.

“A lot of times we never even had time for supper,” Ingersoll says.

The typical shoot lasted seven to 10 days, with no days off. All of Ingersoll’s expenses were covered. The pay was $150 a day when he started and was up to $300 a day when he quit doing it seven years later.

And, of course, Marlboros were provided.

“We always had a coffee can with some water in it,” Ingersoll says. “They didn’t wait long after you lit one before they’d stop. They only wanted a little ash in the picture. Then you’d drop it in the coffee can and light another one. A lot of the pictures were just of you lighting a cigarette.”

He says he’d typically use up half a carton of Marlboros--five packs--on a day’s shoot.

Ingersoll wasn’t a Marlboro Man when he started modeling--his smokes were unfiltered. “But from my first day [modeling], Marlboro was my brand,” he says. During the first few years, Philip Morris sent all the cigarettes he wanted to his home too.

“But then they quit,” Ingersoll says. “They said it was unlawful to send them through the mail. I don’t think that’s true, but anyway, after that, I had to buy my own.”

What did Jim Braddy see that day at the Augusta Rodeo?

“Well, you had to be a smoker--if you’re not, you just don’t hold the cigarette right,” Ingersoll says. “They wanted crow’s feet around your eyes, a Dick Tracy chin.

“And you had to know how to ride a horse.”