But Enough About You: Essays (51 page)

Niven said to the man, “I say, that must be the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen.”

The man stiffened. “That’s my wife.”

Niven quickly said, “I meant the
other
one.”

“That’s my daughter.”

Niven looked the man calmly in the eye. “I didn’t say it!”

Maybe I’ll try that next time.

—
Forbes FYI
, May 1998

The Department of Health and Human Services has announced that cigarette packages and advertisements will soon be required to feature “frank, honest and powerful depictions of the health risks of smoking.” These depictions include smoke streaming from a hole in a man’s neck, a set of cancer-ravaged gums, nicotine-baked autopsied lungs, and a illustration showing a baby born to a smoking mother, gasping for breath. Got a light?

Several U.S. tobacco companies, proudly holding high the torch of individual responsibility, tried to block the government action, calling the images “nonfactual and controversial” and what’s more “intended to elicit loathing, disgust and repulsion.”

Where is the Marlboro Man when you need him? Unavailable, alas. Wayne McLaren died of lung cancer, age fifty-one, and may he rest in peace. The poor guy spent his declining months haunting stockholder meetings of the Philip Morris company—now Altria, which sounds less smoky—trying to get its officers to acknowledge corporate complicity in the disease that was killing him. Philip Morris executives were about as forthcoming and apologetic with poor McLaren as the heads of Fannie Mae, Goldman Sachs, AIG, and other exemplars of American capitalism have been with their victims.

The new warning labels are, on the one hand, impactful (apologies for that awful word). As a precocious juvenile delinquent, I started smoking at age thirteen, filching my mother’s Philip Morris–made Marlboros. Would I have lit up so gleefully had the flip-top box been festooned with a photograph of a pair of gray, tumor-eaten lungs?

Possibly not, though never underestimate the blitheness of an adolescent bent on looking cool, never mind the costs. My mother died years later of smoking-related illness. And as it happens, my father died of emphysema, not from cigarettes, but from cigars. Unlike a certain U.S. president, he inhaled.

But to pose the question bluntly: Is it necessary—really—at this late stage to slap gruesome decals on a product that any human being with an IQ above cretinous knows to be lethal? Or is it more prudent to continue on the assumption that we are a nation of idiots?

U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry’s epic report on the link between smoking and mortality became public in 1964. (I just looked him up and learned that this splendid American’s middle name was Leonidas, presumably derived from the heroic Spartan leader at Thermopylae who was as lethal to invading Persians as Marlboros are to smokers today.) Surely by now, anyone reaching for that match knows that he’s lighting not just a cigarette but a fuse.

There are two competing American behavioral archetypes: Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty. Uncle Sam is stern but loving. He exhorts us to defend our country and to be good citizens. Lady Liberty stands for—well, freedom. Her statue, rising above the waters of New York
Harbor, announces that this is the country where you can be anyone you want, do anything you want—so long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.

Occupying the middle ground between Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty is what we libertarians call the Nanny State. Nanny State is the national bossypants, telling us what not to do. Don’t smoke. Don’t eat so much. Don’t drink. Put down that 36-ounce Coca-Cola! What are you doing on that bicycle without a helmet? Put it on—now! And brush your teeth.

Some decades ago, not content with snatching Marlboros and Twinkies and soda pops from our hands, Nanny decided that she should also be in charge of the national sense of humor. This new rule became Political Correctness. PC is the voice we hear from the back of the room after the laughter has subsided, saying, “
That’s
not funny.” The importance of being earnest, but not quite Oscar Wilde’s version.

I’m not against the new cigarette labels. But I’m not sure I’m for them. Is this a thoughtful position, or just wishy-wash?

Cigarettes kill—no argument there. So does alcohol. So logically, if that pack of Boros is to be decorated to look like a page from a medical textbook, shouldn’t bottles of booze depict car crashes, cirrhotic livers, and beaten wives? And why stop there? Shouldn’t Big Macs and Burger King Whoppers come with Before photos of those sad souls who appear on TV’s
The Biggest Loser
?

For that matter, shouldn’t French directors of the International Monetary Fund be required to wear signs saying:
CAUTION: MAY BE HARMFUL TO HOTEL MAIDS?
And since the new cigarette labels will take effect at the height of the presidential campaign, surely the candidates should be required to wears buttons that say: “
WARNING: WILL PROMISE ANYTHING TO GET ELECTED
.”

—
The Washington Post
, June 2011

(Hint: Pretend They’re Telegrams)

I got an e-mail the other that clocked in at 1,286 words. Mark Twain once famously apologized to a correspondent for a long letter, saying he hadn’t had time to write a short one.

In the not-so-old days, when electronically transmitted messages were generally urgent, every letter counted. Quite literally. I remember going over the wording of a telegram with the Western Union operator, trying to figure out how to cut it down to the fifteen-word economy-rate limit. They were great editors, those operators; and sticklers who wouldn’t let you get away with, say, turning multiple words into one merely by adding a hyphen. Say,
Love-and-kisses
. “Sorry, sir. That’s
three
words.”

It occurred to me that it had been a long time since I had gotten or sent a telegram. Cheap long-distance telephone, faxes, and now e-mail have made it possible to be as wordy as we want, but in our rush to communicate instantly (and incessantly), we did not pause either to mourn the passing of the telegram as a literary form or to reflect upon its legacy. As those distinctive yellow forms pasted with teletype strips of tape passed from our lives, so did a certain poetry, drama, and wit.

When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, a knock on the door from the Western Union messenger, always smart in cap and uniform, often signaled a significant moment—more often than not, bad news. The generation before mine had trembled at the approach of the same messengers, who might be bringing a message that began,
THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET
. . . .

Telegrams had their own code words, such as
STOP, SOONEST, PROCEEDING, -WISE, ADVISE
. The form itself was designed for
concision. The American architect and engineer Buckminster Fuller once famously sent a cable to the Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi, explaining the key equation in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in 249 words. It’s considered a masterpiece of compression. What makes Robert Benchley’s classic telegram from Venice to his travel agent—
STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE
—so perfect is the superfluous
PLEASE
.

In his introduction to Joyce Denebrink’s
Barbed Wires
, a delightful collection of telegrams, Marvin Kitman wrote that as an art form, the telegram is even more demanding than Japanese haiku, since haiku allows seventeen syllables, and the former only fifteen words. With wit worthy of the form he was illuminating, Kitman tells us that the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, had been seeking to instill a new, simple literary form that would displace the “flowery New England transcendentalists who dominated the literary Establishment. Unlike those chatterboxes Thoreau, Emerson, and especially Whitman, Morse loved the brief, the clear, the bold, a style epitomized in his code. The Morse code was popular with the avant garde not only because it pruned the deadwood out of the language, but because it couldn’t be understood by the masses.” Who knew that the Morse code was about elitism?

The very first telegraph message ever sent, on May 24, 1844, was only four words long. Morse tapped them out in the old Supreme Court Chamber (now the Law Library) in the U.S. Capitol, in the presence of Dolly Madison and Henry Clay. As you already know, they were:
WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT!
Thus was the Age of Communication ushered in. His partner, Alfred Vail, sitting in a railroad station forty miles away in Baltimore, tapped back,
YES
, ushering in the Age of Miscommunication. (Morse’s somewhat portentous four-letter message was not of his own choosing; that honor had for political reasons gone to the daughter of the commissioner of patents. Vail had been Morse’s fellow student at Yale, and had persuaded his father to put up the money for their prototype telegraph device. When they were ready to test it, Vail asked Dad to suggest something to transmit through the three miles of wire stretched around their lab in New Jersey. He proposed:
A PATIENT WAITER IS NO LOSER.
It’s an ironic choice, considering that they were inaugurating an era of instant communication. Try quoting that the next time sometime phones you in a rage from Hong Kong because the 5,800-page document you e-mailed to him two minutes ago
still hasn’t arrived
.

Between the first taps on Morse’s telegraph keypad and the playing of taps for the telegram 130-odd years later, the wires (and wirelesses) vibrated with precisely chosen
bon mots
. If you wanted to tell someone off, there was no medium more suited to the task than a well-chosen telegram. The best example of that genre may be the one someone sent Lord Home, the foreign secretary:
TO HELL WITH YOU. OFFENSIVE LETTER FOLLOWS. IRATE CITIZEN.

It was especially satisfying when two dynamos of repartee got going, as in the exchange between George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. Shaw invited Churchill to the opening of his new play:
HAVE RESERVED TWO TICKETS FOR MY FIRST NIGHT. COME AND BRING A FRIEND IF YOU HAVE ONE.
Churchill’s reply:
IMPOSSIBLE TO COME FIRST NIGHT. WILL COME TO SECOND NIGHT IF YOU HAVE ONE.

There was the Tango Telegram, with one partner functioning as the straight man. Jesse Lasky, head of Paramount Pictures, wired the playwright George S. Kaufman:
OFFER $40,000 FOR SCREEN RIGHTS TO ONCE IN A LIFETIME.
Kaufman wired back:
OFFER $40,000 FOR PARAMOUNT COMPANY.
When Cary Grant, notoriously touchy about his age, received a telegram from a magazine editor asking
HOW OLD CARY GRANT?
, he replied,
OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?

Telegrams recorded imperiousness high and low. When Frederick Remington cabled William Randolph Hearst from Havana in 1897 to report,
THERE WILL BE NO WAR. I WISH TO RETURN,
Hearst famously cabled back,
PLEASE REMAIN. YOU FURNISH THE PICTURES AND ILL FURNISH THE WAR.
(Actually, this exchange turns out to be apochryphal, but why let that ruin the story?) Less well known is the telegram Mrs. Peter Sellers got one afternoon while she was working in the kitchen and her actor husband was upstairs in his study:
BRING ME A CUP OF COFFEE. PETER.

The telegram traffic between war correspondents and their editors
back home provided some good moments. The correspondent for the London
Express
got this from his boss:
DAILY MAIL MAN SHOT. WHY YOU UNSHOT?
The same prefix allowed Evelyn Waugh to trump his editor in 1935, when Waugh was covering the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The comic novel that resulted from that experience,
Scoop
, teems with cables from Boot to his paper,
The Daily Beast
: NOTHING MUCH HAS HAPPENED EXCEPT TO THE PRESIDENT WHO HAS BEEN IMPRISONED IN HIS OWN PALACE BY REVOLUTIONARY JUNTA HEADED BY SUPERIOR BLACK NAMED BENITO . . . LOVELY WEATHER BUBONIC PLAGUE RAGING.
When a rumor began circulating that an English nurse had been killed in an air raid, Waugh’s editor cabled,
SEND TWO HUNDRED WORDS UPBLOWN NURSE.
After checking it out and ascertaining there was no story, Waugh cabled back,
NURSE UNUPBLOWN.

Concision sometimes leads to confusion. In 1933, the U.S. ambassador in Sofia, Bulgaria, cabled the Balkan desk of the State Department as follows:
QUEEN HAS GIVEN BIRTH TO A DAUGHTER. HAVE CONGRATULATED PRIME MINISTER.
The Maud Committee, which in 1940 advised the British government that a fission bomb was feasible, owed its name to a somewhat garbled understanding of a telegram. When the German army occupied Denmark, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr sent a telegram to friends in England informing them that he was safe. It ended with the sentence,
PLEASE INFORM COCKCROFT AND MAUD RAY, KENT.
British intelligence thought it was code and, after great labor, decrypted the sentence to mean, “Make uranium day and night.” They subsequently learned that Maud Ray had been Bohr’s English nanny.

What you read in a telegram depended on where you stood. When a lawyer unexpectedly won a difficult case for a client, he wired,
JUSTICE HAS TRIUMPHED!
The client immediately cabled back,
APPEAL THE CASE AT ONCE!
The weak link might be the clerk taking down the message, as in the case of the farmer in England who was anxiously awaiting delivery of a shipment of ewes, only to receive this alarming news:
TWENTY BLACK-FACED YOUTHS DESPATCHED BY RAIL 9 PM.

Sometimes of course the idea
was
to deceive, and telegrams could be
artful instruments of dodging. The French violinist Jacques Thibaud (1880–1953) once embarked on an extended
liaison amoureuse
, arranging for his wife to receive a series of telegrams:
CONCERT IN BERLIN FANTASTIC SUCCESS. SEVEN ENCORES, LOVE JACQUES. ROME RECITAL SOLD OUT. IMMEDIATELY RE-ENGAGED. JE T’EMBRASSE. JACQUES. WARSAW CONCERT UNBELIEVABLE SUCCESS. MILLE BAISERS.
And so on. When he got home, he and his wife were in the middle of dinner when the maid brought a telegram:
BRUSSELS APPEARANCE SENSATIONAL. RAVE REVIEWS. I MISS YOU. JACQUES.
However sensational Brussels might have been, the scene at the Thibaud dinner table was surely more so.