20 Old Hollywood Stars Who Sold Oddly Unglamorous Products

For much of Boris Karloff’s career, he had been responsible for bringing Frankenstein’s monster and the Mummy to life on screen for Hollywood horror films. Yet by 1947, the English actor could be found in US periodicals such as Time, reclining in a Northern Pacific Railway Company passenger coach, reassuring post-war travelers that their journey aboard his train would be “fright-free.”

Buster Keaton was known for his deadpan stunts and lack of facial expression in his silent films. He wasn’t called “The Great Stone Face” for nothing! When television advertising came along in 1958, he found new use for that skill. He starred in Alka-Seltzer antacid ads made by Miles Laboratories. In one ad he played a frazzled window washer. In another, he was a mailman being chased around the block by an assortment of animals who all found relief after dropping a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets into their glasses of water. He didn’t speak a single line. The animated character Speedy took care of the dialogue, voiced by Dick Beals.

Cynical, raspy-voiced comedian W.C. Fields abhorred reading words other than his own on the air. When he joined Lucky Strike’s Your Hit Parade in late 1938, sponsored by the American Tobacco Company, he created a long-lost son named Chester, whom he mentioned during four successive broadcasts. At that point, the executives got wise: “Chester Fields” sounded an awful lot like a competitor’s product, Chesterfield. He was fired in less than a month.

John Wayne rose to fame playing tough guys in westerns and war films, and during the 1950s he used that persona to endorse Camel cigarettes, manufactured by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In an ad, he claimed Camels didn’t irritate his throat during long outdoor shooting sessions, and unlike most of the other celebrities on this list, Wayne actually did smoke. He was operated on for lung cancer in 1964 and died in 1979.

By 1915, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp was already a global icon. Chaplin’s studio, Essanay, licensed him out to O’Sullivan’s Rubber Heels, a line of shoe-repair accessories with no relation to Ed Sullivan, and print ads showed the Tramp clomping down the street with the heels attached. They cushioned the shock of city pavement for ordinary working people. It might be one of the first movie-character tie-ins of all time.

The king of silent film sex symbols, Rudolph Valentino, the “Latin Lover,” could not legally make movies in 1923 because he was in a dispute with his studio, Famous Players-Lasky. For 17 weeks, however, he and his wife, Natacha Rambova, toured 88 cities for the Mineralava Beauty Clay Company, dancing the tango, adjudicating beauty pageants, and extolling the virtues of the clay’s mud treatments. The star didn’t make the stuff. He was simply a well-paid salesman who danced his way around a judge’s injunction.

Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, created the classic CBS sitcom “I Love Lucy,” and in 1951, Philip Morris cigarettes agreed to pay $30,000 an episode to sponsor it. That cash paid for the then-novel practice of shooting the series on 35mm film before a studio audience. In early episodes, Ball’s and Arnaz’s characters, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, smoked Philip Morris cigarettes on screen, and the brand was mentioned in the dialogue.

Mary Pickford was the sweetheart of silent movie audiences across America and co-owner of a new movie studio called United Artists. Pickford’s wholesome public image made her a natural fit for the brand. The Pompeian Massage Cream company, which made a pink cream you’d rub onto your skin and peel off to lift away the dirt, hired her in 1917 to be its first “Pompeian Beauty of the Year.” Pompeian sent out her picture on collectible calendars across the country, using the wholesome Pickford image to sell the cream as something respectable and sanitary.

Child star Shirley Temple helped carry 20th Century Fox through the Depression. Fox licensed the Temple name to Quaker Oats in 1937. Sunday comic strips under the title Shirley Temple’s School Days credited Quaker Oats’ “shot-from-guns” puffed wheat cereal with giving Temple the energy she needed to dance and act in such films as Heidi. Her guardians and the studio made the deal, but the royalties still came to over $1 million.

Groucho Marx became famous for making fun of the posh as a member of the Marx Brothers comedy team and the host of the TV quiz program You Bet Your Life. In 1955, Kellogg’s hired him to star in print ads for Sugar Frosted Flakes. Mustache, glasses, and cigar still in place, Groucho traded witticisms with the new Kellogg’s star, Tony the Tiger. Kellogg’s believed it could appeal to the grocery-shopping parents, as well as the kids watching cartoons.

Humphrey Bogart was famous for playing hard-boiled private eyes, especially in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. He probably seemed an unlikely choice for the front of a box of chocolates, but in 1954 he agreed to pose with Whitman’s Sampler with the tagline “Here’s How I Remember! Why Don’t You?” Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures negotiated the deal to help advertise Bogart’s upcoming movie The Caine Mutiny, with Whitman’s paying the studios in candy and free ad space rather than cash straight to Bogart.

After Gary Cooper finished Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Chrysler hired the rising Western star to promote its DeSoto motorcars in 1936. The magazine ads had him getting out of a DeSoto sedan in front of a studio lot. The headline read, “Yes, it’s actually Gary Cooper stepping out of a smart new DeSoto!” The campaign ran for only one film.

Electric Auto-Lite Spark Plugs once went all-in with actress Joan Blondell in a 1937 advertising campaign. The headline read “Spark Plugs Also Look Alike.” Since there aren’t many women who look like Joan Blondell, said the ad copy, there shouldn’t be many spark plugs that perform like Electric Auto-Lite.

Silent film’s most prominent starlet, Gloria Swanson, was known for her opulent wardrobe well before her role as a washed-up actress in Sunset Boulevard. As early as the 1930s, the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company had Swanson modeling for its Doublemint Chewing Gum in several print advertisements. Doublemint promised that its chewing gum would exercise the muscles of your face and keep your jawline looking young. So basically, this huge glamour icon known for her silk gowns was out there pitching a nickel pack of gum like it was part of your skincare routine.

Rudy Vallée, crooner and bandleader whose radio variety show was one of the first hits in the format, was also part of a series dedicated to selling yeast. Between 1929 and 1936, Standard Brands paid to have The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour on NBC, encouraging listeners to consume the Fleischmann’s compressed cake yeast either plain or dissolved in water because it supposedly could cure their indigestion and skin blemishes. This wasn’t baking yeast out of a jar, either. It was perishable, eaten raw as a health tonic.

As Joan Crawford was moving from MGM to Warner Bros. in 1944, shortly before the role that would win her an Oscar for Mildred Pierce, Royal Crown Cola placed her in advertising for its soft drink. The company’s ads said that the beverage was Crawford’s personal favorite, based on a studio-sponsored taste test, and that the soda had been served to GIs at the Hollywood Canteen. It was glamour on loan to a low-budget soda that hoped to compete against Coca-Cola.

Ronald Reagan was still a Warner Bros. contract star, decades from the White House, but he appeared in Chesterfield ads during the 1940s and 1950s. He was pictured grinning next to Christmas trees, clutching cartons of cigarettes that could easily be posted to friends or soldiers abroad. Biographers have pointed out that Reagan wasn’t even an everyday smoker in his private life. His appearance in those ads was a publicity stunt for the studio, timed around the holidays.

By the time Rheingold Extra Dry Lager came knocking in 1958, Marlene Dietrich was already a screen icon. She’d appeared in films such as The Blue Angel and Morocco before the lager brand hired her for a print campaign. The famous German actress was dressed in elegant evening gowns, and one of the ad’s slogans said: “In all the world, no better beer, says Marlene Dietrich.” Brewer Liebmann Breweries hoped her European chic would elevate the brand so that people living in cities would think of ordering it.

In The Adventures of Robin Hood, Errol Flynn swung swords. In the 1940s, Warner Bros. lent him out to Vitalis Hair Tonic in exchange for free magazine ads. They said Vitalis, which was made by Bristol-Myers, kept Flynn’s hair looking good under the hot studio lights and during outdoor stunt scenes.

Bing Crosby went beyond simple pitchman status in 1948 when he purchased $2,000 worth of stock in Vacuum Foods Corporation and sat on its board of directors. He hosted a daily show on CBS Radio for the company, advertising Minute Maid frozen orange juice, a partnership that ran for decades and helped turn Minute Maid into a household name.

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