Cowboy Killers: How West Hollywood Brought Down the Marlboro Man Billboard

The ruggedly handsome man was sexy. And boy was he tall, 70 feet tall in fact. He wore a cowboy hat too. Some might even say he was… smoking hot.

For about two decades, that sexy combo was enough to make the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Marmont Lane one of the most recognized intersections in the country. The icon was welcoming all into the City of West Hollywood. Who was this man? He was The Marlboro Man, and he stood above the Chateau Marmont like he owned the place. Cause in a way, he did. The rock clubs, record stores and gay bars buzzed below. The iconic Sunset Strip was his domain. Men wanted to be him, women wanted to do him. Who are we kidding! This was West Hollywood, there were lots of men who wanted to do him too. Fun fact, I spent an unforgettable New Year’s Eve with a real Marlboro Man. Tom was his name, a true cowboy, if you catch my drift. 

Then one rainy morning in March 1999, a crew arrived and took the not so real Marlboro Man down. He was gone for good. He was there until he wasn’t.

As LAist recently reminded us, it didn’t happen because of public outcry. It didn’t happen because Philip Morris had a change of heart. It happened in part because a $206 billion legal settlement forced cigarette makers off billboards nationwide, and in part because a West Hollywood councilmember whose parents had both smoked themselves to death had spent years trying to make it happen first.

“It was one of the most effective symbols of tobacco marketing,” said Paul Koretz, who was standing at the site that morning to watch it go.

The Building That Started It All

Before there was a Marlboro Man, there was a nightclub.

The building at 8225 Sunset Boulevard was constructed in 1926 by Preston Sturges, the celebrated screenwriter and director. It later housed the Players Club, a celebrity haunt that counted Lana Turner, Fred Astaire, and Clark Gable among its regulars.

In the 1950s, a billboard entrepreneur named Elmo Legg bought the property. He looked at the lot next to the building and saw potential. He put up a sign.

Legg’s firm went on to help define the Sunset Strip billboard culture. The spot he claimed at 8225 Sunset eventually became home to the Marlboro Man, which many consider the most famous billboard in America.

In 2014, WEHOonline reported that Larry Legg, Elmo’s son, had a plan for the spot. He called it an eastern gateway. The pitch was $400,000 worth of landscaping, palm trees lit from below, a bench, public art meant to evoke Palm Springs. Legg would pay for it all, even offered to kick in $40,000 toward a welcome sign the City would design. The Council was supposed to take it up that September. Nothing came of it. 

Where the Brand Was Born

Marlboro started as a women’s brand. The tagline was “Mild as May.” The ads ran in magazines and showed smooth hands and the suggestion of good taste. Nobody much bought it.

Filtered cigarettes were the problem by the early 1950s. Men didn’t want them. The filter read as soft. Philip Morris needed something to fix that.

Leo Burnett had the account. He was a Chicago man who built careers on simple images. He ran through options. A sailor. A hunter. A guy in a suit. None of them stuck. The cowboy did. Philip Morris started hiring actual ranch hands and rodeo riders for the shots.

Sales in 1955 hit $5 million. The year before the cowboy campaign, the number had been a fraction of that. By the 1970s Marlboro was outselling every other cigarette in the country. Advertising Age eventually called it the top advertising icon of the twentieth century.

The Strip Was the Right Home

The Sunset Strip has been many things over many decades. One of them was the world’s best outdoor advertising corridor, particularly in the 1970s, when record labels figured out what a good sign on Sunset was worth.

Elektra Records hung one in 1967 for a little-known local act called The Doors. It worked. Abbey Road went up for the Beatles. Led Zeppelin got one. Joni Mitchell. Bob Dylan. The Rolling Stones. Springsteen. By the mid-1970s the Strip was a vertical trade publication for the music industry.

The Marlboro Man was already there for all of it.

Mayor John Heilman said the sign was simply part of the street.

“It was such an iconic ad — such a tall billboard with this very handsome image up there,” Heilman told LAist. “Right there by the Chateau Marmont and near a lot of music venues that we have up on Sunset.”

The image on the board changed every couple of years, though few people noticed. Philip Morris also added an effect at one point that Heilman still remembers.

“As I recall, at one point they actually had steam coming out of it to simulate smoke,” he said.

The LA Business Journal in 1998 described the spot as the unofficial gateway to the Sunset Strip. The sign was among the top ten most expensive billboard locations in Los Angeles.

The Actors Who Died

The man on the billboard was not the same man every year. Philip Morris cycled through dozens of models over four decades. Real ranchers. Rodeo riders. Stunt performers.

Some of them died.

David Millar, one of the first men to appear in the television campaign, died of emphysema in 1987. Wayne McLaren, who appeared in print ads in 1976, was diagnosed with lung cancer at 49. He spent his final years testifying before state legislatures, appearing at Philip Morris shareholder meetings, and telling a reporter from his deathbed in Newport Beach, “I’ve spent the last month of my life in an incubator and I’m telling you, it’s just not worth it.” McLaren died in 1992 at 51.

David McLean, who appeared in television and print campaigns starting in the early 1960s, died of lung cancer in 1995. McLean’s widow and son sued Philip Morris the following year, arguing the company had required McLean to smoke up to five packs per take during filming. His family said nicotine addiction had made it impossible for him to stop.

Eric Lawson, who appeared in print ads from 1978 to 1981, died of COPD in 2014. He had started smoking at 14.

Philip Morris initially denied that Wayne McLaren had ever appeared in a Marlboro ad. The company later acknowledged his image had appeared in a retail display.

Marlboro Reds eventually earned a nickname. Cowboy killers.

West Hollywood Moved First

Paul Koretz helped lead the fight for West Hollywood’s incorporation in 1984 and won a City Council seat shortly after. He lived near the Strip. He drove past the billboard every day.

Both of his parents were lifelong smokers. Both died from it.

Koretz pushed through a restaurant smoking ban and spent years building a broader tobacco advertising ordinance. By late 1998, the City Council was set to give final approval to a ban on tobacco billboards citywide. There was a problem. The City’s lawyers advised exempting the Sunset Strip portion of the ordinance, fearing a First Amendment lawsuit from Philip Morris.

Koretz accepted the exemption but kept pressing behind the scenes, working directly with billboard companies to take the sign down voluntarily.

He also acknowledged a complicated relationship with the image he was trying to kill.

“It’s a difficult issue for me in a way because, while I oppose tobacco advertising, I’m also a historic preservationist, and that billboard is a historic part of the city,” Koretz said in December 1998. “I’d like him to be in a museum, like the dinosaurs.”

The exemption became moot. In November 1998, the Master Settlement Agreement was reached between the nation’s major tobacco companies and 46 state attorneys general. The $206 billion deal resolved state lawsuits seeking to recover health care costs from smoking-related illness. It banned outdoor tobacco advertising nationwide. Billboard companies had until April 23, 1999 to comply.

Philip Morris moved ahead of the deadline.

March 10, 1999

The crew arrived on a rainy morning. The Marlboro Man came down on March 10, 1999, six weeks before the national deadline.

Koretz held a news conference at the site. He said not everyone was happy to see it go.

“It was always controversial,” he said. “There are always people that didn’t like it.”

Ken Bernstein, then director of preservation issues at the Los Angeles Conservancy, offered a measured goodbye. “We’re not weeping over the loss of the Marlboro Man,” Bernstein said. “The Sunset Strip billboards are more important collectively than any one particular image.”

The space did not stay empty. Within weeks, a new billboard went up in the same spot. It showed a cowboy who looked a lot like the Marlboro Man. He had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The cigarette was limp.

The word across the top read: “Impotent.”

Under the terms of the settlement, Philip Morris was required to keep paying rent on the billboard location through the end of the year. The tobacco company’s money paid for the anti-smoking ad that replaced it. The California Department of Health had been running similar satirical parody billboards near the same location since at least 1993.

What Came After

The City of West Hollywood has continued expanding its tobacco regulations. Smoking was banned in outdoor dining areas in 2011, in public parks in 2020, and in common areas and new units of multi-family housing in 2021. The City prohibited the sale of flavored tobacco products that same year.

Koretz went on to serve in the state Assembly and later on the Los Angeles City Council.

“This is largely a success story,” he said.

That corner of Sunset still draws eyes. The Chateau Marmont is still there. The Legg property at 8225 Sunset, the lot where Elmo Legg first saw room for a sign in the 1950s, still stands. The Strip hosts a dizzying array of digital billboards, some say there’s too many, others want more. Either way, one thing remains a constant: everyone wants a piece of it.