If you think product placement is a recent phenomenon in Hollywood, think again. Six decades ago stars such as Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Spencer Tracy were taking the equivalent of millions of dollars in today’s money in return for glamorising cigarettes.

According to a study based on formerly confidential tobacco industry documents, companies including American Tobacco, Reynolds and Liggett & Myers funnelled huge quantities of cash into the bank accounts of A-list stars willing to endorse cigarette brands.

The stars would often appear in full-page newspaper advertisements to tie in with the release of a new Hollywood drama or comedy.

Few seemed to have any qualms about the potential health risks posed by smoking, first pointed out in a 1929 scientific paper by Fritz Lickint, of Dresden, Germany. (More than 300 years earlier James I had concluded essentially the same thing, describing the tobacco habit as “a custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs”.) A scientific consensus on the dangers of smoking did not emerge until the mid-1950s, however.

Almost 200 stars, including two thirds of the Top 50 box office actors from the late 1930s and 1940s, took the Big Tobacco shilling, praising brands for their taste, smoothness and ability to provide relaxation. John Wayne, who died of lung cancer eventually, told the public that cigarettes helped his voice.

“Commercial arrangements between the movie industry and tobacco companies were there from the very beginning,” said the report’s co-author, Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco.

The trail of documents upon which the report was based goes back as far as 1927, with a campaign by Al Jolson, of The Jazz Singer fame, and ends in 1951, when TV replaced cinema as the best way to promote smoking.

The report was published this week in the British journal Tobacco Control.

Between 1937 and 1938 alone, a single company, American Tobacco, handed out $218,750 — $3.2 million (£1.7 million) in today’s money — to various Hollywood stars to promote the Lucky Strike brand. The report said that this was part of a massive strategy that ran for nearly a quarter of a century, the intention being to make smoking a symbol of virility for young men and a symbol of femininity and freedom for young women.

In one case, researchers found that the Lucky Strike name or jingle occurred 268 times in 135 minutes of radio broadcast time. Robert Jackler, another co-author of the report and a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said that the covert endorsement deals benefited Big Tobacco and Hollywood’s big studios, while significantly enriching the stars.

“The studio system used tobacco advertising to sell its movies while the tobacco industry used Hollywood to sell its brands and reassure a worried public that smoking was not harmful,” he said.

Tobacco use remains popular in Hollywood according to the website scenesmoking.org, with leading actors lighting up in almost two-thirds of all movies released today.

The tips

— Gary Cooper $10,000 ($146,583)*

— Joan Crawford $10,000 ($146,583)

— Henry Fonda $3,000 ($43,975)

— Edward G. Robinson $3,000 ($43,975)

— Clark Gable $10,000 ($146,583)

Actor Fee (*Inflation-adjusted)

Source: Tobacco Control 2008

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