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I do joke, because I do smoke. I know that smoking implies certain health risks, which I am alerted to, now and again, by friends, strangers and the media. TV stopped carrying cigarette commercials in 1969, but often runs antismoking commercials, like the one in the 80s starring Brynner, and broadcast after his death from lung cancer. This year there was a spot taped by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, proclaiming his regret that years of smoking led to larynx cancer. We'd never deny a man the right to clear his conscience and increase his celebrity quotient at the same time; may Eszterhas live for a hundred years. But, considering how noxious his scripts were (he is the auteur of "Jagged Edge," "The Music Box," "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls"), one has to wonder if his movies shouldn't have carried health-warning labels — and if bad writing is not itself carcinogenic.
Nor do I doubt the honorable intent of the "This is your lung on nicotine" brand of TV propaganda. I do wonder at some of the conclusions drawn from anecdotal evidence. That David McLean, the model for the Marlboro Man in 60s ads, died young of lung cancer should carry no heavier symbolic meaning than that James Fixx, the jogging guru, died young of a heart attack while jogging. I am also a tad skeptical (as Klein is) of the campaign to italicize the effects of second-hand smoke. Why have claims of deaths from second-hand smoke risen so dramatically in the past few years, when the number of smokers has dropped significantly, and the number of public spaces where they can light up has been so drastically limited?
PUT THAT OUT!
The battle over smoking is part of a bigger fight: the crusade some people want to wage over regulating what other people are allowed to consume. On one side is the healthy minority: the yoga-practicing, vegetarian, jogging, PBS-member activists — most of whom don't smoke and don't want anyone else to. On the other side is the complacent majority: the great glutinous mass of sedentary, morbidly obese, fries-with-that, "Man Show"-watching, internet-porn-downloading slobs — many of whom smoke and want to keep doing it. The war is fought on all these fronts, between those who would elevate the current culture (by force of law) and those who would wallow in it.
The difference with smoking is that the forces of enlightenment-repression are winning. Have won. And they're not good winners. "Like wars of religion," Klein writes, "the campaign against smoking lends itself to cruel fanaticism and self-righteous indignation." People who would never dare chastise a colleague for his body odor or four-letter vocabulary will demand of a smoker, "When you gonna give up that awful habit?" Children on the street shout "Don't do that!" at a smoking stranger, as their parents beam in approval at the kids' do-gooder rudeness.
Olivier, my French barber down here in St. Martin, describes this attitude as being "politely correct," but there's nothing polite about it. The polite ones are the smokers. They know they are plague victims and suspect they may be carriers. So they try meeting a censorious society more than halfway. They grab a few furtive puffs outside of their office building. (In winter this make for a poignant tableau; in the future, more smokers may die of chilblains than emphysema.) At cocktail and dinner parties where having a cigarette is implicitly forbidden, smokers indulge their health-nut friends by abstaining, though they may excuse themselves every hour or so for a quick nicotine fix al fresco. I can recall only one Manhattan soiree in the past 15 years where someone lit up unbidden; that was Paul Schrader, the writer-director, who had built his movie reputation on being a bad boy.
The only folks likely to say yes when asked if smoking is permitted are the elderly — perhaps because they are by disposition more tolerant or gracious, or because they grew up in a day when indoor smoking was the norm. Old friends Howard Koch, Dorothy Delaney, Ruth Dunn and Addie Richter have all granted me my nicotine indulgence. One even said, when I asked to light up, "Please do. I love the smell of cigarette smoke." (This flummoxed me. I know of no one else who loves, likes or is indifferent to cigarette smoke. No air freshener comes in a Stale Ciggie scent. No one requests the dry cleaner to add a dab of Odeur de Butt to a dinner jacket. As someone who often changes clothes before smoking — my smoking jacket is an old T shirt — I've mused rancorously on why tobacco companies never came up with a stinkless cigarette.) Anyway, I bless the social largesse of my octogenarian friends. May it earn them places, but not too soon, in a smoke-free heaven.
So we are agreed: polite it ain't, this tobaccophobic vigilantism. And I'm not sure it's correct. People find all sorts of pleasurable ways to shorten their lives. They drink or eat stupidly. They cheat on their spouses and get caught. They worry or rile themselves into an early grave. The act of breathing brings all of us one breath closer to death. (Some places more than others. On arriving in New York in 1965, I was told that simply inhaling the city's air was equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes in a clean environment.) So why don't the non-smokers take a laissez-fumer approach — live and let die?
The first answer is the simplest: because they can. There's no Smokers' Lib to give a moment's pause, a scintilla of scruple, to the anti-puff posse. The more complex answer is threefold: smoking is (1) an evil habit that (2) the public recognizes as such and (3) the perpetrator can correct, by quitting. Smoking is seen, and smelled, as an insult to civilization. It is also one of the few insults that civilization can forcefully address. The mannerly middle class may not be able to outlaw assault weapons or rap music or violent movies, but it can shove smokers (usually the working class, the minorities and the young) into pariah status right next to the serial killers.
These days, of course, even multiple murderers are treated to the panoply of psychiatric intervention. So are compulsive gamblers, foot fetishists and people who like Josh Groban. Cigarette smokers are virtually the only addicts who can't count on federal subsidy or public sympathy. We know when we're licked, and there's no use whining. So we stoically bear the vituperations of the six-year-old who sees us lighting up and shouts, "Put that out!"
Out it goes and, with it, the notion of smoking as a soothing arbiter of middle-class behavior. Like the loosening of a necktie, it signaled a relaxation into informality at the end of a meal or the start of a baseball game, before drinks or after sex. Even for the solitary steam fitter or housewife, the act of sending a geyser from mouth to ceiling could envelop the user in a penumbra of calm thoughtfulness. It was an empyrean for daydreams — the cloud of smoke our thoughts went up in.
CIGARETTE CULTURE
American pop culture — in its movies, TV shows, music, fashion, comic books — has spread across the globe, an octopus strangling indigenous art forms. But before all this Pop Americana, centuries before, was the cigarette. (Sir Walter Raleigh took it from the Indians and brought it to his queen, Elizabeth, in the 1590s) Klein calls cigarettes "America's gift to the world."
And Americans venerated smoke and smokers. In the last mid-century, Humphrey Bogart and Edward R. Murrow were twin saints of wartime and postwar liberal machismo. The actor and the newsman looked a bit alike, had similarly commanding baritones and were rarely seen without a cigarette — an emblem of their masculinity and integrity. That both men succumbed early to cancer did not diminish their aura; no, death testified to it, intensified it. Here was the pleasure a real man was willing to die for. The cigarette was a prime weapon in their arsenal of cool, and the one they allowed to be turned on them.
Politicians can be as influential as movie stars in the shaping of public perceptions. F.D.R.'s cigarette, in a holder at a jaunty angle, proved him both a dapper patrician and a man of the people, while the can-do bosses of the public weal sucked on fat cigars. Smoke-filled rooms gave us Social Security and the Marshall Plan. In smoke-free rooms we get Iraqification and Enron. (Recall that Clinton — no liberal, but a man eager to try any sensation — enjoyed a good cigar, and that Monica Lewinsky, to prove she was a game gal, used one of them as an agent of vaginal adventure.)
The cult of cigarettes was everywhere. France's postwar intellectuals — Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus — were, as "Cigarettes Are Sublime" shows, inevitably photographed smoking. Nicotine was the Existentialist's drug of choice. Jean Cocteau, Jean Gabin, Edith Piaf and Coco Chanel carried that same prop; the dicta of Left Bank swank demanded a cigarette to complete the couture. (Cocteau wrote that cigarettes "have, with potent charms, seduced and conquered the world.") In the 60s, Jean-Luc Godard blew smoke rings as profligately as he exhaled movie ideas; that cloud of smoke was a thought-balloon in the comic strip of French aesthetic life.
HERE'S SMOKING AT YOU, KID
In old Hollywood movies, smoking was always sublime. Fred and Ginger, Bogie and Bacall, every gangster, gunslinger and G.I. used cigarettes to emblematize their suavity, maturity, grit. Kids loved the lordly caterpillar in Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," purring, "Whoooo are yooooo?" while blowing his Alpha-Bits smoke rings. America's favorite movie, "Casablanca," has an elaborate hierarchy of cigarethics, which Klein persuasively codifies, noting that all the men smoke and none of the women do.
He makes one mistake, though: he credits the movie's lack of femmes fumeurs to "the taboo in 1942 that prevented Hollywood films from showing women smoking." If Klein, a professor of French literature at Cornell, had looked at other movies of the period, he would have found smoking women everywhere — before 1942, after it and during it. One of the stars of "Casablanca" was Paul Henreid, who played the Resistance hero Laszlo. In "Now, Voyager," the film he made before "Casablanca," Henreid famously ignited two cigarettes, gave one to Bette Davis and puffed away with her in sublimation of the love (outside marriage) that dared not speak its name but could display itself metaphorically in two glowing sticks in the night.
This was nothing new to movies. Throughout the 30s, women's equality with men was expressed by their smoking no less than by the snappy patter. Of course, lighting up had practical benefits — it kept an actor's hands busy, it offered a little drama within the larger one, it gave the cameraman another point of illumination, of visual allure — but it also cued the audience to aspects of a star character. In general, only a strong, assertive woman would smoke. I'm as chic as any man, the gesture said, and as tough; I can take it in and blow it out.