by Wayne Curtis
On Trinidad, the U.S. military arrived with fistfuls of U.S. dollars, Chiclets chewing gum, and cigarettes. With the soldiers also arrived case after case of Coca-Cola—war being a prime occasion to boost sales. (During World War I, Coca-Cola ran ads slyly associating itself with patriotism, one ad depicting a hand bearing a glass of Coke in front of the Statue of Liberty, bearing a torch.) When America entered World War II, Coca-Cola moved swiftly, starting with a company commitment that servicemen would always be able to buy a bottle of Coke for a nickel, the same price it cost during World War I. Coca-Cola sent its own small army of technical advisers abroad to follow the troops. When a region was secured, the advisers would immediately set up bottling operations to ensure that the soldiers were never without Coca-Cola.
The Coca-Cola Company also commissioned studies to show that well-rested, well-refreshed soldiers performed better than tired and thirsty soldiers, and that, in short, war went better with Coke. Some 10 billion Cokes were served to soldiers around the globe during World War II. An unusually large number of solders wrote home that they were fighting, among other reasons, for the right to drink Coca-Cola. (In God Is My Co-Pilot, Colonel Robert L. Scott wrote that his thoughts when shooting down Japanese fighters were of “America, Democracy, Coca-Colas.”)
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In 1943, a trained cellist turned comedian arrived in Trinidad on a tour of West Indian military bases. His name was Morey Amsterdam, and he was winding down from a ten-week USO tour. Rubbery-faced and with a memorably nasal voice, Amsterdam is best remembered as Buddy Sorrell, the comedy-writing sidekick on the immensely popular Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s. In the 1940s, he broadcast twelve radio shows a week and was known as a “human joke machine” who could spit out jokes on any topic with the speed and firepower of a Gatling gun.
While on Trinidad, he overheard sailors and soldiers singing a catchy calypso song around the base. It was a version of a number made popular by an island singer named Lord Invader, who had adapted the lyrics of an earlier tune. The original tune was composed in 1906 by Trinidadian musical prodigy Lionel Belasco and originally entitled “L’Année Passé”; it told in French patois the melancholy story of a young country girl from a good family who fell in love with a cad who cast her aside and left her to fend for herself as a streetwalker. Lord Invader altered the song to make it about American soldiers and their off-duty activities. He had recently visited Point Cumaná—a beach near the naval base at Chaguaramas—and here he watched the American soldiers flirting with the island girls and drinking rum followed by a chaser of Coca-Cola. He wrote a calypso about what he saw:
Since the Yankees came to Trinidad,
They have the young girls going mad,
They young girls say they treat them nice,
And they give them a better price.
They buy rum and Coca-Cola,
Go down Point Koomhana
Both mother and daughter
Workin’ for the Yankee dollar.
The song was a great local hit with both Trinidadians and sailors. Amsterdam liked it, too, and figured that he might sing a version of it on one of his radio shows. Back home, he sanitized the lyrics somewhat. Instead of “young girls going mad” around the Yankees, he changed it to “They make you feel so very glad.” Yet the mother and daughter remained working for the Yankee dollar, and Amsterdam added some goofy new lyrics, among them:
Native girls all dance and smile
They wear grass-skirts, but that’s okay
Yankees like to “hit the hay.”
Amsterdam worked with a pair of professionals to polish the song and help with the scoring: Jeri Sullivan, a singer best known for her work with Mel Tormé and the Mel-Tones; and Paul Baron, then the musical director for the CBS broadcast network. Success remained elusive: eight publishers turned the song down. Then, after singing it on one of his shows, Amsterdam received a call from Leo Feist, who said he’d be honored to publish the tune.
The “Lana Turner moment” didn’t arrive for “Rum and Coca-Cola” until late 1944. The Andrews Sisters, a popular trio of sisters from Minnesota whose stardom was built on hits like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” were in New York to record for Decca Records. LaVerne, Patty, and Maxene had finished up half an hour early one afternoon and, rather than break, decided to record a silly song with a catchy beat they heard for the first time just the night before. It was, of course, “Rum and Coca-Cola.”
“We just threw it in,” Patty Andrews later recalled in Swing It! The Andrews Sisters Story. “There was no written background, so we just kind of faked it.” The sisters used the same faux-Caribbean accents they had earlier adopted in “Sing a Tropical Song,” and the whole recording took less than ten minutes. It was pressed on the flip side of a curiously plaintive ode called “One Meat Ball,” a song that Decca expected would be a huge hit.
“One Meat Ball” proved prophetically titled. Although this song edged briefly into the top twenty, it was “Rum and Coca-Cola” that took the single into the stratosphere. This wasn’t without complications. Since the song glorified drinking, national radio networks weren’t eager to broadcast it to the dry states, making the network a lightning rod for teetotaling critics. Anyway, liquor advertising over the airwaves was illegal, and the song seemed to venture into a murky region between advertising and entertainment. Financial considerations also arose: Why should the networks give the highly profitable Coca-Cola Company a free ride? Shouldn’t they be billed for the airtime when the song was broadcast? Then there was the whole mothers-and-daughters-working-for-the-Yankee-dollar thing. That the GIs abroad were hitting the hay with “native peaches” probably wasn’t the best morale booster for a nation at war, and no one wanted to be seen as undermining the war effort. (The Andrews Sisters, somewhat disingenuously, said that they never really considered the lyrics, but just liked the rhythm.)
Any objections fell aside as the song proved a force of nature. Sheet music flew off the shelves—by February 1945, nearly a half-million copies had been sold, driven in large part by the exotic place names and oddball lyrics behind the hard-to-discern accents. On January 6, 1945, the Andrews Sisters’s “Rum and Coca-Cola” broke into the Billboard Top 30, where it would remain for twenty weeks, ten of those in the number one spot. It also hit number one on Variety’s “Jukebox Hits” list. (Bacon’s Grille in Phoenix banned the record from its jukebox following an uprising of waitresses who refused to hear it played eight hours straight.) Decca could scarcely keep up with demand, and the company had to beg other record companies for shellac, which was in short supply during the war, to keep pressing the disk. The song would go on to sell 7 million copies and be the third bestselling hit of the 1940s, topped only by Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz.”
“Rum and Coca-Cola” was a huge hit with soldiers at military bases, and the most requested Andrews Sisters song during their USO tours. The song was called “the National Anthem of the G.I. camps.” And soon rum and Coke became the de facto national drink of many of the troops. During World War II, General George Patton reportedly ensured that the Coca-Cola “technical observers” had unfettered access to get their job done efficiently and quickly, in large part because he demanded a reliable supply of Coca-Cola to mix with his rum.
By 1946, Gourmet writer and bon vivant Lucius Beebe would write in his Stork Club Bar Book that the Cuba libre, the daiquiri, and the MacArthur Cocktail were as “dominant in their field as Martinis or Scotch and Soda are in theirs.” (The MacArthur, sadly forgotten, was made with rum, triple sec, and a dash of egg white.) Rum and Coke had achieved icon status.
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Morey Amsterdam had “borrowed” the song without permission and profited from it greatly. This did not go unnoticed in Trinidad. After the song became a smash in
ternational hit, a lawsuit was brought by Maurice Baron, a music publisher who had recently come out with a collection of West Indian songs that included Lionel Belasco’s “L’Année Passée.” Belasco, who was then in his seventies, traveled to New York to testify in the trial. The plaintiffs suggested that Amsterdam brought the song from Trinidad as a tourist might a suitcase full of rum. Amsterdam continued to insist that all the lyrics were his. Yet a number of facts were marshaled to upend his assertion. Among them: The plaintiff’s lawyer had soldiers take the stand to testify that throughout the island substantial portions of the song had been sung long before Amsterdam had even arrived. And it didn’t help that Amsterdam had earlier boasted to Time magazine that he had “imported” the song to the United States. Amsterdam shared the common attitude that calypso, no matter how recently composed, fell under the category of “folk song,” and was free to be harvested and exploited by traveling foreigners as they saw fit.
In February 1947, a federal judge prohibited Amsterdam and the other defendants from further profiting. He ordered up an accounting (Amsterdam claimed he had made $60,000 off the song), and said that henceforth all profits would go to Belasco. “There is no doubt in my mind that Amsterdam brought both the words and the music with him from Trinidad, and it was in substantially that form that the song was published,” the judge wrote. Amsterdam et al. appealed the verdict, but the courts once more ruled that his “songwriting” was tantamount to theft. The rights and profits from “Rum and Coca-Cola” returned to the island whence it came.
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Like the loser in a game of musical chairs, the liquor industry found itself stuck with a surfeit of cheap, scarcely potable rum when the war ended. By one estimate, the United States was saddled with a five-year supply in its warehouses and stockrooms. Making things worse, the liquor trade slid into a slump after an initial burst of postwar buying. Rationing on most goods ended, and consumers bought up those things they had long gone without—like stockings and gasoline. Liquor was overlooked, and sales fell from a peak of 231 million gallons in 1946 to 160 million in 1949. Price wars erupted as distillers and distributors struggled to reduce their inventories. As a result, rum was almost always the cheapest spirit on the shelf, often selling for less than the taxes levied on it. Even Scotch could be had for $5 a bottle, half the wartime price. Even with the prices low, rum’s share of the liquor market fell—not only from pumped-up wartime levels, but from prewar levels. It now sat at a dismal 1.3 percent.
Puerto Rico was especially hard-hit, since its tax-free status made it the chief exporter of rum to the United States. The island found itself saddled with some 20 million gallons in storage—the equivalent of a ten-year export supply and more than all the other rum-making nations combined. Of the seventeen distillers that produced rum during the war, ten closed soon after.
This brush with mortality led the rum industry to conclude that something had to change. And two things happened. Rum went further in the direction of Bacardi, defining itself as a light and refreshing liquor. And it embraced techniques of modern marketing.
Puerto Rico took the lead. In 1948, it passed the Mature Spirits Act, which required that all Puerto Rican rums had to be aged at least three years. This had a double benefit. It ensured a higher-quality rum that helped the island establish a stronger brand, and it immediately reduced reserves, allowing supply to drift somewhat closer to demand.
Puerto Rican rum makers also tried to increase demand by launching a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign in the United States. For an American in the early 1950s, it would have been hard not to know about rum. Some thirty-five hundred liquor dealers put rum promotions in their windows in 1952 (almost twice as many as the prior year), and the Rum Institute, based in Puerto Rico, ran numerous ads in major American magazines and newspapers. Double-page ads touted the merits of thirteen brands of rum from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Drinkers were encouraged to ask for “free Rumsters!”—brightly colored cardboard cutouts that an easily amused drinker could affix to the rim of his or her glass. Rumsters included a tuxedoed man who appeared to be sipping a drink through a straw and a jockey riding the edge of a glass. On the reverse were jingles design to correct misperceptions. One example: “Some people think all rum is sweet/But that’s a silly myth./Smooth Puerto Rican rum’s a treat/And dry—just try a fyth!” A million Rumsters were distributed in 1950, and demand among liquor dealers for the free novelties pushed distribution to 3 million by 1952.
The new advertising campaign was funded in part by the U.S. government, which hoped to increase its revenues from taxes on rum. The government also underwrote a film entitled A Glassful of History, starring Burgess Meredith, to be shown at liquor sales conventions, and paid for a research facility at the island university to improve both quality and production efficiency.
By 1952, Puerto Rico had started to reclaim its stature among rum exporters, largely by leading the charge toward lighter and lighter rums. They took the Cuban experience—stripped out the more overbearing tastes and aromas—and built on it.
So, tastes moved away from the distinctive toward the unexceptional, from full-flavored to light. “U.S. Taste Buds Want It Bland” read a 1951 headline in Business Week. Rum took notice. It was the era of Wonder bread and iceberg lettuce, when complexity of taste gave way to ease and convenience of preparation. The art of mixing a balanced drink, which never fully recovered from the interruption of Prohibition, was further lost as elderly mixologists in short-waisted scarlet jackets retired from hotel bars. Surveys showed that more people were drinking at home than in bars or restaurants. The preferred cocktails shifted with it. Complex drinks lost favor. Make it easy, Americans said, and make it bland.
Surveys in the 1950s showed that more than half of all drinkers actually didn’t like the taste of liquor. This was especially true in two key markets: women and young men. As that Business Week story noted in 1951, “from all the available data it looks as though Americans of the 1950s like their drinks well watered down.” Sweet fell from fashion and dry came to dominate. The dry martinis started to elbow aside the sweeter Manhattan.
And a new kid appeared on the block: vodka. Given its current ubiquity, it’s hard to imagine that until the middle of the last century vodka was all but unknown in the United States. A colorless and nearly tasteless spirit distilled from whatever was available (grain, potatoes, molasses), it was an exotic spirit consumed by few Americans. It got a modest boost during Prohibition, since it was easy to doctor up as a fake whiskey. But as late as 1948, the cocktail writer David Embury noted that no imported vodka was available, only a few domestic brands: “It’s not exactly what I have called ‘common liquors.’ ”
Vodka would go perfectly with the austere outlook of modernism. The drive was to get rid of the clutter of the past and welcome the clean lines of modern architecture. Vodka was as invisible as the glass walls now cladding the new skyscrapers, as light as the clean lines of the Scandinavian furniture now in homes. The brown spirits—bourbon and rye and rum—were part of the old regime, the spirituous version of an overblown Victorian home. The future belonged to the transparent.
Foremost among the vodka producers was Smirnoff, produced by Heublein—a company that in 1907 got its start making A.1. Steak Sauce and later introduced the breakfast cereal Maypo and the barbecue accessory Sizzl-Spray. (The latter was a spray-on barbecue sauce that had to be taken off grocery shelves because the cans had an unfortunate propensity to explode.) The original Smirnov vodka was produced by an old-line Russian family and favored by the czars. This lineage put it in bad odor when the Bolsheviks came to town, and the family and business moved to France for a time, without much success, before they sold the company to Heublein—which immediately made the name more American-friendly by replacing the “v” with “ff.”
Vodka’s glorious rise in the American consumer market can be credited in large par
t to Heublein’s shrewd marketing. It deftly publicized a series of novel vodka drinks, beginning with the Moscow Mule—a mix of lime, ginger beer, and vodka, and served “by tradition” (wholly fabricated) in a five-ounce copper cup. The Moscow Mule was invented by an executive at Heublein, who leveraged its novelty into a hot national trend, especially among younger and more rebellious drinkers not averse to irking their elders by ordering “a Commie drink.” (Bartenders even organized and marched in New York with placards that read “Smirnoff Go Home. We Can Do Without the Moscow Mule.” Smirnoff reaped the free publicity, and neutered its critics by pointing out that all of its vodka was made at home of patriotic American grain.) Smirnoff later promoted other easy-to-guzzle drinks like the screwdriver, the Bloody Mary, and the bullshot, the latter a mix of vodka and beef bouillon.
Vodka had much to commend it. It not only had the lighter, nearly undetectable taste for which Americans now clamored, but it could be produced and sold right from the still, with no inconvenient aging or prescient market demand forecasts. And it didn’t impart a common stigma of a problem drinker—booze breath. Smirnoff’s advertising slogan was “It leaves you breathless,” which suggested that an executive might suck back five vodka martinis at lunch without being detected back at work. When distillers of other liquors disputed the claim, Smirnoff hired a lab to run tests. The lab concluded that vodka actually couldn’t be detected on the breath just five minutes after consumption, compared to the half hour required for the dissipation of other liquors. Sales of vodka boomed, nearly rivaling gin by the late 1950s. Vodka sales weren’t tracked in the 1940s, but by 1955 they had risen to 3.5 million cases. And by 1960, they had soared to 18 million cases, with Heublein’s Smirnoff accounting for 30 percent of the market.