Thank You for Smoking (6 page)

"I've got to go," Nick said.

"I want you to bring Joey for supper on Sunday."

"Can't. Sunday's bad."

"How can
Sunday
be bad, Nick?"

"I have to cram for the Oprah show on Monday afternoon."

Pause. "You're doing the
Oprah Winfrey
show?"

"Yes."

"Well. You'd better get her autograph for Sarah. Sarah loves Oprah Winfrey." Sarah was the housekeeper, the reason Nick was incapable of standing up to his own secretary. "Does Oprah smoke?"

"I doubt it."

"Maybe you'd better get her autograph
before
the show. Just in case everyone gets angry, the way they did when you were on with Regis and Kathy Lee."

He was late. He hurried down to the basement garage and drove aggressively through the Friday afternoon traffic, and pulled up in front of Saint Euthanasius a good half hour late. Joey, in his uniform, was sitting on the curb outside the main building looking miserable. Nick screeched to a stop and bolted out of the car as if he were part of a SWAT team operation. "I'm late!" he shouted, loudly belaboring the obvious. Joey cast him a withering glance.

"Ah, Mr. Naylor." Uh-oh. Griggs, the headmaster.

"Reverend," Nick said with what forced delight he could muster. Griggs had never quite forgiven him for putting down under "Father's Occupation" on Joey's school application form, "Vice President of Major Manufacturers' Trade Association." Little had he realized that Nick was a senior vice president of Genocide, Inc., until one night when he caught Nick on
Nightline
duking it out with the head of the flight attendants' union over the effects of secondhand smoke in airplanes. But by then Joey was safely enrolled at this, the most prestigious boys' school in Washington. Griggs glanced at his watch to indicate that it was not lost on him that Nick was half an hour late.

"How are you," Nick said, thrusting out his hand. He decided to dispense with mendacious banter about the congestion of Friday afternoon traffic in D.C. "Good to see you," he said mendaciously. He didn't especially enjoy being singled out for silent contempt by the headmaster of a school whose parents included Persian Gulf emirs and members of Congress. For $11,742 a year, the Reverend Josiah Griggs could park his attitude in his narthex.

"The traffic was awful," Nick said.

"Yes." Griggs nodded slowly and ponderously, as though Nick had just proposed major changes in
the Book of Common Prayer. "Fri
days . . . of course."

"We're going fishing this weekend," Nick said, changing the subject. "Aren't we, Joe?"

Joey said nothing.

"I wonder if you might stop by sometime next week," Griggs said in that assured, headmasterly way. Nick was seized with alarm. He looked over at Joey, who provided no clue as to this summons.

"Of course," Nick said. "I'm away on business the beginning of the week." It crossed Nick's mind: did Griggs watch Oprah? Surely not.

"End of the week, then? Friday? You could come by to pick up Joseph a
little
. . . early?" A thin smile played over his narrow face. "Fine," Nick said.

"Splendid," Griggs said, brightening. "What are you fishing for?" "Catfish."

"Ah!" Griggs nodded. "Ellie, our housekeeper, loves catfish. Of course, I can't get past their looks. Those
fearsome
whiskers." He walked off to the deanery with his hands clasped behind his back.

Safely inside the car, Nick said, "What did you do?"

"Nothing," Joey said.

"How come he wants to see me?"

"I
don't know," said Joey. Twelve was not the most communicative age. Conversations consisted of games of Twenty Questions.

Great, Nick thought, I get to go into a principal conference totally blind.

"I'm offering total and unconditional amnesty. Whatever you did, it's all right. Just tell me: why does Griggs want to see me?" "I said I don't
know."

"Okay." Nick drove. "How'd the game go?" "Sucked."

"Well, you know what Yogi Berra said. 'Ninety percent of baseball is half-mental.' "

Joey thought about this. "That's forty-five percent."

"It's a joke." And, having nothing to do with revolting bodily functions, not likely to split the sides of a twelve-year-old. He extracted from Joey the score of the game: 9-1.

"The important thing is," he ventured consolingly, "is . . ." What
was
the important thing? Having himself been brought up in the Vince Lombardi School of Child-
Raising, where his father shout
ingly questioned his manhood from the stands every time he missed a grounder, Nick had resolved on a more tolerant approach for his own son's education. ". . . is to feel tired
at the end of the day." Aristotl
e might not have constructed an entire philosophy on it, but it would do. True, Hitler and Stalin had probably felt tired at the end of their days. But theirs would not have been a
good
tired.

Joey registered no opinion of this Grand Unified Theory of Being, except to point out that Nick had just driven past Blockbuster Video and would now have to try a U-turn in busy traffic.

They went through their usual ritual, Joey proposing one unsuitable video after another, usually ones with covers showing a half-naked blond actress with ice picks, or the various steroid-swollen European bodybuilders-turned-actors in the act of decapitating people with chainsaws. Nick countering with Doris Day and Cary Grant movies from the fifties, Joey sticking his finger down his throat to indicate where he stood on the Grant-Day oeuvre. Nick was generally able to reach a compromise with World War II movies. Violent, yes, but tasteful by modern standards, without the super-slow-mo exit wounds pioneered by Peckinpah.
"Here's
one we haven't seen," he enthused,
"The Sands of
I
wo
Jima.
John Wayne. Cool." Joey showed no great zeal for the exploits of the Duke, John Agar, and Forrest Tucker as they fought their way up Mount Suribachi, but said he'd go along if they could also rent
Animal House
for the seventeenth time.

Nick lived in a one-bedroom off Dupont Circle that looked out onto a street where there had been eight muggings so far this year, though only two of them had been fatal. Most of his one-oh-five went to servicing the mortgage on the house a few miles up Connecticut Avenue in the leafy neighborhood of Cleveland Park, where Joey lived with his mother. On alternate weekends, Joey got to go get down and urban with Dad.

Together they ate a nourishing dinner of triple pepperoni pizza and cookie dough ice cream. Cookie dough ice cream. And society fretted about cigarettes?

The Sands of Iwo Jima
was a little dated, but it was a good, big-hearted movie. And there was this . . . transfiguring moment where Wayne, having brought his men through hell to victory, exults, "I never felt so good in my life. How about a cigarette?" And just as he's offering the pack around to his men, a Jap sniper drills him, dead. Without realizing it, Nick took out a cigarette and lit up.

"Da-ad," Joey said.

Obediently, Nick went outside on the balcony.

4

BR
did not offer Nick coffee from his pot, despite t
he f
act that it was six-thirty on a Monday morning. He did not bother with "Good morning," only "I really hope you've got something for u
s, Nick. A lot depends on it."

"Good morning," Nick said, anyway.

"I'm listening." BR was signing things, or pretending to sign things.

"Could I get some coffee?" "I'm
listening,"
BR said.

Better skip the coffee. Nick sat, took a deep breath. "Movies."

"I don't have time for Socratic dialogue, Nick. Get to the point."

"That
is
the point."

BR looked up slowly. "What?"

"I think movies are the answer to our problem."

"How?"

"Do you want the reasoning behind it? I could put it in a memo." "Just
tell
me."

"In 1910," Nick said, "the U.S. was producing ten billion cigarettes a year. By 1930, we were producing one hundred twenty-three billion a year. What happened in between? Three things. World War I, dieting, and talking pictures."

BR was listening.

"During the war, it was hard for soldiers to carry pipes or cigars on the battlefield, so they were given cigarettes. And they caught on so much that General Pershing sent a cable to Washington in 1917 that

said, 'Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration. We must have thousands of tons of it without delay.' " Nick left out the detail that it was in 1919, just after the war, that the first cases of an up-to-then nearly unheard of illness called lung cancer began to show up. The chairman of a medical school in St. Louis invited his students to watch him do the autopsy on a former doughboy because, he told them, they'd probably never see another case of it again.

"So now the men are smoking cigarettes. In 1925, Liggett and Myers ran the Chesterfield ad showing a woman saying to a man who's lighting up, 'Blow some my way.' It broke the gender taboo. But it wasn't until a few years later that we
really
gave women a reason to want to smoke. George Washington Hill, who's just inherited the American Tobacco Company from his father, is driving in New York City. He's stopped at a light and he notices a fat woman standing on the corner gobbling chocolate, cramming it down. A taxi pulls up and he sees this elegant woman sitting in the back and what is she doing? She's smoking a cigarette, probably one of Liggett and Myers' Chesterfields. He goes back to the office and orders up an ad campaign and the slogan is born, 'Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.' And suddenly the women are lighting up. And they've been puffing away ever since. As you know, they're about to become our most important customers. By the mid-nineties, for the first time in history, there will be more women smokers than men."

BR shifted in his chair.

"What else is happening around then? The talkies. Talking pictures—1927, Aljolson. Why was this
significant? Because now direc
tors had a problem. They had to give actors something to do while they talked. So they put cigarettes in their hands. Audiences see their idols—Cary Grant, Carole Lombard—lighting up. Bette Davis—a chimney. That scene where Paul Henreid lights both cigarettes for them in his mouth at the end of
Now, Voyager?
Pioneered the whole field of cigarette sex. And Bogart. Bogart! Do you remember the first line Lauren Bacall says to him in
To Have and Have Not,
their first picture together?"

BR stared.

"She sort of shimmies in through the doorway, nineteen years old, pure sex, and that voice. She says, 'Anybody got a match?' And Bogie throws the matches at her. And she catches them. The greatest screen romance of the twentieth century, and how does it begin? With a match. Do you know how many times they lit up in that movie? Twenty-one times. They went through two packs in that movie."

"Now she's hawking nicotine patches," BR said. "Where is this all leading?"

"Do you go to the movies, BR?"

"I don't have
time
for movies."

"Perfectly understandable. With your schedule. Point is, these days when someone smokes in a movie, it's usually a psychopathic cop with a death wish, and then by the end he's given it up because he's adopted some cute six-year-old orphan who tells him it's bad for him. Sometimes, rarely, you get a situation where the smokers are cool or sexy, like in that TV show,
Twin Peaks.
But it's never mainstream. It's always"—Nick made quote marks with his fingers—" 'arty.' But nine times out often, they're deviants, losers, nutcases, convicts, and weirdos with bad haircuts. The message that Hollywood is sending out is that smoking is uncool. But movies are where people get their role models. So . . ."

"So?"

"Why don't we see if we can't do something about that?" "Like what?" BR said.

"Get the directors to put
the cigarettes back in the actors
' hands. We're spending, what, two-point-five billion a year on promotion. Two-point-five billion dollars at least ought to buy lunch out there."

BR leaned back and looked at Nick skeptically. He sighed. Long and soulfully. "Is that
it,
Nick?"

"Yes," Nick said. "That is it."

"I'll be frank with you. I'm not blown away. I was hoping, for your sake, to be blown away. But," BR sighed for effect, "I'm still on two legs, standing."

Sitting, actually. It was Nick who was being blown—or swept— away. Pity, too. He thought the Hollywood idea had possibilities.

BR said, "I think we need to rethink your position here."

So, there it was, the handwriting on the wall, in large, blinking neon letters:
you're history, pal.