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Though Gray's family connections did not hurt him, he got no soft treatment, and asked for none. He lived out of a suitcase for six years while selling Reynolds products in the East and Midwest, then was assigned to sell Camels to the Navy, where Reynolds had less than 6% of the business. He stayed at it for two years, worked so hard that Reynolds had 25% to 30% of the Navy market when he left. In 1936 he met Elizabeth Palmer Christian, a Virginia banker's daughter, at a friend's wedding, quickly decided to marry her. Three years later he became Reynolds' assistant sales manager. After a hitch as a Navy lieutenant commander in the war (he was landlocked in Intelligence), Gray was moved onto Reynolds' board in 1947, became a vice president in 1949, moved up to president in 1957 and to chairman last September.
Quiet Assassination. War's end found cigarette sales stronger than ever, but the dominance of the plain old regular-size cigarette was soon to end. First came the king-size cigarette. American's Pall Mall got there first, and did well. Reynolds decided to try a king with mild tobacco, brought out Cavalier. Cavalier flopped, still accounts for less than i% of the market, may eventually be dropped. Says Gray: "We goofed." The reason: top management thought it sniffed a shift to blandness in public taste in everything from music to food, brought out CavaHer to play to this trend over the opposition of Reynolds' sensitive-tongued tasting panel.
When the cancer controversy began, the industry thought disaster was at hand.
Instead, the few filters already on the market (e.g., Brown & Williamson's Viceroy and Benson & Hedges' Parliament) began to get hot. Reynolds was ready with its own filter, developed under a team consisting of Chairman John C. Whitaker, President Ed Darr and new Sales Chief Bowman Gray. The man who had seen filters coming was Darr, who was impressed by their popularity in Switzerland during a vacation. But the man who decided when to roll was Gray. Reynolds' test panel had smoked 250 versions of the trial Winston over two years when Gray took a puff of a new blend numbered 736 one day in 1954. Cried he: "This is it! Let's go all out for it." The company did—and Winston took over leadership among the filters in 1955. Reynolds followed up its victory by introducing the mentholated Salem, timing it just right to hit the growing demand for menthol.
The company also got an unexpected puff from Winston's slogan—"Winstons taste good like a cigarette should"—which had been dreamed up in an advertising session with Gray. Questioning the use of "like," Critic Clifton Fadiman assailed the "quiet assassination of the conjunction 'as,' " and Editor Bruce Bliven cried: "I find that I sit in front of my television set shouting at the tiny figures on it: 'No, no, you dope. Like is a preposition.
The conjunction is as, as, asT " Reynolds was delighted by the furor, like any cigarette maker might be.