Thank You for Smoking

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 directors 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.

'I see,' Nick said. 'Do you want me to clear out my desk before lunch, or do I have until five?'

'No no,' BR said. 'Nothing has to happen today. Jeannette will need you to show her where everything is. Why don't you go ahead and do the Oprah show.'

Nick wondered if he was supposed to thank BR for being so magnanimous. 'Oh,' BR said, 'if you see an opening, you can go ahead and announce that we've committed five hundred grand to an anti-underage smoking campaign.'

'Five hundred… thousand?'

'I thought you'd be pleased,' BR gloated. 'It was your idea. It wasn't an easy sell in Winston-Salem. The Captain called it 'economic suicide,' but I told him you thought we needed a little earnest money so people will know that we care about kids smoking.'

'Five hundred thousand dollars isn't going to impress anyone. That'll buy you a couple of subway posters.'

'It's the idea that counts.' BR smiled. 'Better hurry or you'll miss your plane.'

On the way out it occurred to Nick to buy some flight insurance in case BR had already canceled his benefits.

5

Nick just had time for a quick jog along Lake Michigan.

If you represented death, you had to look your best. One of the first smokesmen to get the axe was Tom Bailey. Poor Tom. Nice guy, didn't even smoke, until he'd boasted about that one time too many to a reporter, who put it in her lead. JJ had called him in on the carpet, handed him a pack of cigarettes, told him that as of now he was a smoker. So Tom had started to smoke. But he had not kept up at the gym. A couple of months later JJ saw him on C-SPAN wheezing and pale and flabby, and that was the beginning of the end for Tom. So Nick kept up: jogging, weights, and every now and then a tanning salon where he would lie inside a machine that looked like it had been designed to toast gigantic grilled-cheese sandwiches.

'You look good,' Oprah said backstage before the show. She was very cheery and chatty. 'You look like a lifeguard.'

'Not as good as you.' Nick was pleased to see that she had put back on some of those seventy-five pounds that she'd lost. As long as there were overweight women in the world, there was hope for the cigarette industry.

'We tried to get the surgeon general to come on, but she said she wouldn't come on with a death merchant.' Oprah laughed. 'That's what she called you. A death merchant.'

'It's a living.' Nick grinned.

'I can't understand what that woman is saying half the time with 42 that accent of hers.' Oprah looked at him. 'Why do you do this? You're young, good-looking, white. Weren't you… you look familiar, somehow.'

'I'm on cable a lot.'

'Well why do you do this?'

'It's a challenge,' Nick said. 'It's the hardest job there is.' She didn't seem to buy that. Better get on her good side before the show. 'You really want to know?'

'Yeah.'

Nick whispered, 'Population control.'

She made a face. 'You're bad. I wish you'd say that on the show.' She left him in the care of the makeup woman.

Nick studied the sheet listing the other panelists, and he was not happy about it. There had been changes since Friday.

It showed: the head of Mothers Against Smoking — swell — an 'advertising specialist' from New York, the head of the National Teachers' Association, one of Craighead's deputies from the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention. It irked Nick to be up against someone's deputy. What was Craighead doing today that was more important than trying to scrape a few inches of hide off the chief spokesman for the tobacco industry? Dispensing taxpayers' dollars to dweebish do-gooders? There was not much preshow banter between them as they sat in their