David Lehman, in the American Scholar, offers a eulogy to the cigarette in the cinema. It’s a nice article.
What a shame that the Puritans successfully banned smoking. You used to ask permission to smoke, and the common reply was:”It’s a free country.” Not anymore. Today’s rebellious young and the rural left-behinds sometimes smoke, but they pay a whopping fine with every puff. The average national price for twenty cents worth of cigarettes is $8.00, and you’ll pay closer to $12.00 in NYC.
I miss cigarettes myself: especially that first cigarette in the morning with one’s coffee, the one lit directly after a fine dinner, the chain-smoked cigarettes that stimulated one’s inspiration when writing. I quit decades ago because I declined to be bothered by the hankering for a smoke when the ban descended on business offices everywhere. I refused to be one of the pathetic lepers huddled surreptitiously outside shivering in the cold enslaved by the habit. I also had no intention of paying the monstrous premium tacked on going straight into the coffers of the State and the pockets of shysters from the litigation bar.
I thought recently of having a cigarette once again, for old times sake, and when I looked, I found that they stopped selling unfiltered Lucky Strikes in 2006. I couldn’t get my old brand without paying $35-$45 a pack “collectible” price.
I have considered writing an ironic “modest proposal,” in the vein of Jonathan Swift, advocating the return of cigarettes to movies, which might shorten life expectancy and thereby ease the costs of long-term health, but friends have dissuaded me on the grounds that the irony would not be grasped.
In 1929, when cigarettes were marketed to women as “torches of freedom,” well-dressed debutante types were paid to smoke while strolling down Fifth Avenue in the Easter Parade.
“Do you remember the last cigarette you had when you gave them up?”
“Which time?”
“I used to think that all I wanted was the respect of honorable men and the ungrudging love of beautiful women,” says Philip Marlow, the hospitalized mystery writer in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. “Now I know for sure that all I really want is a cigarette.”
In the first sentence of Too Many Cooks (1938), Rex Stout’s narrator, Archie Goodwin, says that he “lit a cigarette with the feeling that after it had calmed my nerves a little, I would be prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands, in a swimming-suit.” That’s quite a lift to be gotten from a smoke.
Leave aside the rush of nicotine. Forget the ritual of opening a pack of unfiltered Luckies, Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls, tamping them down, pulling one out, lighting it, discarding the match, taking the first, satisfying long drag. Cigarettes are the greatest prop of all time: puffing, taking in the smoke, drawing in a deep lungful and slowly expelling it, holding the cigarette between your index and middle fingers, motioning with that hand to underscore a point.
“Cigarettes are sublime,” Richard Klein asserts in a book he wrote to console himself when trying to quit smoking.[1] Sublime, maybe; sexy, for sure. “Cigarettes had to go,” the poet and noir connoisseur Suzanne Lummis concedes. “But the cinema lost a language. Aside from the smoking, the lighting of the cigarette could be handled so many ways with such different effects. Richard Conte, Robert Mitchum, all those guys—in two smooth gestures they’ll slide out that silver lighter and make the flame leap up, and we get the message—this is what unflappable cool looks like, virile confidence.”
There is the cigarette of loneliness, the cigarette of desperation: Jean Gabin holed up in his attic room, chain-smoking his last Gauloises, as the police close in on him in Le Jour se lève. There is the cigarette of heartbreak, the chain of cigarettes that won’t help you “forget her, or the way that you love her,” with all the force Sinatra can put into the singular female pronoun in “Learnin’ the Blues.” And there is the cigarette of intense nervousness, jeopardy, and fear smoked by Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, stunning in black cap and veil with black dots. When with a shaky hand Dunaway lights up, Jack Nicholson points out that she already has a cigarette going, and says: “Does my talking about your father make you nervous?”
Lighting somebody’s cigarette is a powerful gesture, suggesting intimacy or the desire for the same. “If you’re going to smoke, you gotta learn to carry matches,” Dix (Sterling Hayden) says when he lights up Doll (Jean Hagen) in The Asphalt Jungle. Aldo Ray does it for Anne Bancroft at the bar in Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall, and Glenn Ford performs the gallantry for Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s Human Desire. When Lana Turner falters trying to light her cigarette, John Garfield does the honors, foreshadowing the adultery and murder in The Postman Always Rings Twice. The movie producer played by Kirk Douglas teaches the self-same Lana Turner how to smoke sexily in The Bad and the Beautiful, while Dick Powell has the flame Claire Trevor needs in Murder, My Sweet.
Suzanne Lummis draws my attention to the moment “when Powell fires up his lighter and Trevor puts her hand on his and moves it toward the tip of her cigarette.” Says she: “You will help me, won’t you?” He: “Am I doing this for love, or will I get paid with money?” Toward the end of the movie, when “Helen, who is actually Velma, who is actually a killer … rises from the shadows with her cigarette, in her gown slashed with stripes of glinting sequins,” the images presage danger and disaster. Soon bullets will be flying and bodies dropping.
In her discussion of smoking, Lummis also cites In a Lonely Place. Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) sit at a piano with other couples, listening to the silky-smooth rendition of the lounge singer, vocalist and pianist Hadda Brooks: I was a lonely one, till you. “He lights a cigarette for her, and she takes it in her mouth, such an intimate gesture,” Loomis writes. “He whispers to her. They are so in love. And it will never be that good again. Nothing is going to be that good again, for either of them. If these characters had lives beyond the credits at the end, we know that each on their dying bed looked back and thought, ‘that’s what happiness felt like.’ And because someone who unsettles their composure enters the club, that happiness didn’t even last the length of the song. That’s noir.”
To step into the Nat Sherman Townhouse in Midtown Manhattan is to step back in time, say fans of the 90-year-old tobacco emporium.
It is a place where smoking isn’t only allowed, but also is encouraged. The store sells all manner of high-end tobacco items, from hand-rolled cigars to premium cigarettes, including some that it produces under the Nat Sherman banner.
In days gone by, its customers included such boldface names as Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and Henny Youngman. Even now, store employees say chief executives, prominent politicians and athletes are among the regulars.
But Nat Sherman is soon to become a piece of history itself. The store, which is owned by tobacco giant Altria Group Inc., is closing Sept. 25, company officials said.
Nat Sherman’s own brand of cigars, including its Timeless line, also is being discontinued. But Altria will continue to produce and market Nat Sherman-branded cigarettes, a company spokesman said.
Altria, which acquired Nat Sherman in 2017 from the Sherman family for an undisclosed price, put the store and the cigar line up for sale last October, saying the business wasn’t core to its tobacco portfolio. But a deal with a buyer couldn’t be completed in the months thereafter and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic served to complicate any potential transaction, store officials said.
Michael Herklots, vice president of Altria’s Nat Sherman International division, pointed to the fact that the emporium, situated near the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, saw much of its business from Midtown office employees. Now, about 90% of that customer base is no longer there, he said.
The tragedy, he added, is that the city is losing one of its most treasured retail names.
“We are as authentic to New York as Hermès is to Paris,†he said. …
The store is a place to talk about cigar preferences—mild and creamy or full-bodied and spicy—with tobacconists who have years, if not decades, of experience. Moreover, it is a place just to kibbitz in general—about your work, your family or, better yet, about nothing in particular.
The store offered customers, from those famous names to everyday white- and blue-collar workers, plenty of places to sit back and enjoy a “stick,†to use a cigar smoker’s term, after they shopped. Those who wanted to commit to $3,000 in purchases a year could become members of a private downstairs lounge.
Celebrity chef Geoffrey Zakarian is among the regulars who frequented Nat Sherman for a leisurely smoke.
“You walked in and you felt like you were part of something,†he said.
Gary Oldman has revealed that he gave himself “serious nicotine poisoning†after smoking nearly $20,000 (£14,800) worth of cigars during filming of his new Winston Churchill biopic film. …
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Oldman revealed that he made himself ill after smoking 400 cigars over the course of a 48-day shoot.
“I got serious nicotine poisoning,†he said. “You’d have a cigar that was three-quarters smoked and you’d light it up, and then over the course of a couple of takes, it would go down, and then the prop man would replenish me with a new cigar — we were doing that for 10 or 12 takes a scene.â€
Director Wright, however, said that the price was worth paying, adding: “It’s Winston Churchill. You can’t have Winston Churchill without a cigar.â€
Back in the 1950s, smoking a pipe was as much the fashion at Yale as button-down Gant shirts and scuffed white bucks. The pipe smoker set in New Haven was big enough to support two local purveyors: Johnny’s Pipe Shop at College and Chapel streets, and the older and more upscale Owl Shop, around the corner on College. Johnny’s is gone now, but the Owl Shop is still smoking.
Every year, Johnny sponsored a pipe-smoking contest in association with WYBC, the college radio station. The top prize, which usually was an expensive pipe, went to the smoker who could keep his pipe going the longest.â€
“I set off for the WYBC studio. By the time I got there, the room was filled with hopeful contestants and a variety of smoking devices. Every imaginable size and shape of pipe was on display, from corncobs and classic clay pipes, to a variety of traditional briars, to a Sherlock Holmes–style calabash and a yellowed meerschaum pipe so delicate the smoker wore gloves so as not to stain the exterior with the oils from his fingers. There even were a few Turkish water pipes!â€
“An hour into the match (no pun intended), several green-faced competitors backed out in search of fresh air and a place to chuck.
[Johnny’s] best advice had to do with avoiding nausea, which was sure to well up after an hour or so of puffing. He advised me to take a sip of Coke every now and then to settle my stomach.
So far, I was holding my own. I had used only one match. My pipe was still smoking and the Coke quieted my stomach. More competitors gave up the fight, either from nausea or because their pipes burned out. The field was shrinking.
The guy with the Turkish water pipe was still gurgling away. The last matches were being struck all around me. We were all getting to the bottom of the bowl. Could I hang on? Did I really want to hang on?â€
I was getting a bit dizzy. I used my last pipe cleaner and was sickened by what it cleaned out of the stem of my pipe! I was swallowing this gook! I looked around and saw that the room was emptying fast. I was among the last five or six contestants when Johnny showed up, knowing from experience that the contest end was near.
A WYBC reporter returned prepared to interview the grand winner. I was now suffering from a severe headache and a rancid taste in my mouth. My tobacco’s glow was dimming. I tried to restore it with a few deep puffs, only to suck in a mouthful of licorice-flavored tars.
That did it. I got up from my chair and indicated to the proctors that I was finished. They took my name and noted my finishing time, which I don’t remember. All I know is that I was happy to leave the smoke-filled room and get out into the damp New Haven night. I got back to my room, drank another Coke and rushed into the bathroom to barf.
I preferred Johnny’s to the Owl Shop, better tobacco, better priced pipes. I bought my first pipe, a GBD, from Johnny, and my all-time favorite blend was his Aromatic Cavendish. I still have an ancient humidor smelling of the stuff.
Smoking is, of course, in today’s namy-pamby era streng verboten. In my day, we had ash trays in every classroom. I had one Nietszche professor who routinely bummed Luckies from me. I took a graduate seminar on “Structuralist Approaches to a Theory of Architectural Form” one year in which eleven of the twelve males participating had beards (only I was beardless) and everyone smoked a pipe.
