In 1950, the career of stage and screen actor Boris Karloff was in high gear. He was hosting and performing in the fledgling television suspense series Starring Boris Karloff, and had just completed a run of 321 performances as Captain Hook in the Broadway revival of Peter Pan. The Old Gold company had recently hired him to do advertising testimonials for their cigarettes in exchange for a princely fee. Now he was sailing for his native England for talks with film director Cy Enfield, who wanted him to star in a series of mystery films based on the best-selling John Dickson Carr detective character, Colonel March.
However, all was not well on the domestic front. The House Un-American Activities Committee was focusing their attention on suspected Communist activity in Hollywood, and questions were being raised about this tall, suave, British actor who had, for some reason, adopted a suspiciously Russian-sounding name. What would make an Englishman with the fine old name of William Henry Pratt take on an audacious moniker like “Boris Karloff” ?
With atomic secrets being passed to and fro over the Iron Curtain with increasing regularity, paranoia was running high. There were whispers about secret coded missives being brought into the U.S. by special couriers, some of whom were highly-regarded celebrities. The order went out for federal detectives to seize Karloff as he debarked from his ocean liner in New York City. The actor was rushed in a closed car to FBI headquarters and submitted to a humiliating strip-search.
Finding nothing at all, the detectives determined that the Frankenstein star could be carrying the coded messages internally, a capsule filled with microfilm now lodged somewhere in his digestive tract. A flouroscope and other X-ray machinery were brought in, and Karloff’s body was given a thorough irradiating. Still nothing! Helpless, the FBI was forced to release the actor.
Subsequent publicity was quite embarrassing to HUAC and the FBI, but made the actor once again the toast of Hollywood. And the Madison Avenue advertising executives were quick to make use of the headlines, resulting in the famous copy line, Old Gold Cigarettes…Not a Code in a Karloff.
