Thank You for Smoking

by Christopher Buckley

  "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 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 makeup chairs.

  They were taken onstage to be miked. Nick found himself being ushered to a chair next to another guest, a bald teenage kid. Who, Nick wondered, was he?

  "Hello," Nick said.

  "Hello," said the kid, friendly enough.

  Now why would a bald teenage kid — bald, with no eyebrows — be on this particular panel? A technician wearing large earphones called out, "One minute!" Nick waved over a supervising producer, who rushed over to inform him that it was too late to go to the bathroom. A lot of first-timers were stricken with nervous bladders at the last minute and ended up sitting through the entire hour in damp underwear.

  "I, uh," Nick said
. "I'm fine." He whispered, "Who's the kid?"

  "Robin Williger," the producer whispered back.

  "Why is he on?"

  "He's got cancer."

  "Tell Oprah I need to speak to her right now."

  "Too late."

  Nick pinched the little alligator clip on his lapel mike and undamped it from his Hermes necktie, the orange one with the giraffe motif. "Then she's doing this show without me."

  The producer bolted. Oprah came hurrying, her admirable bosom jiggling under blue silk.

  "What's the problem?"

  Nick said, "I don't like surprises."

  "He was a last-minute substitution."

  "For who? Anne Frank? Well, he can substitute for me."

  "Nick," she hissed, "you know we can't do the show without you!"

  "Yes, I do."

  "Fifteen seconds!" a technician shouted.

  "What do you want me to do? Kick him off the set?"

  "Not my problem."

  But she did nothing. Nick's instinct told him to get out of there. Quick! But there she was, this black woman, commanding him to sit there and finish his supper and he couldn't move.

  She wheeled around with her wireless hand mike and bared her gleaming pearlies at the camera with the little red light.

  Get up! Flee!

  Too late! They were live! Maybe he could just slip quietly away.

  Headline: cigarette flack flees cancer kid.

  To complete the humiliation, he would trip on an electrical cable and bring a klieg light crashing down. The audience would laugh as he lay there, dazed on the studio floor. They would laugh across America, all the housewives hooting, pointing at him. BR would not laugh.

  Cancer Kid would not laugh. No, only the merest, thinnest smile of triumph would play over his lips, tinged with sadness at the tragedy that was so personally his. Nick felt the hot trickle of sweat above his hairline, little beads of molten lava, nothing between them and his eyebrows but smooth, tanning-saloned forehead. And didn't that always look good on TV, having to mop your forehead while you sat next to some dying National Merit Scholar — surely he was one, oh yes, surely he was the president of the student council and debating society and ran the soup kitchen in his spare time when he wasn't tutoring young inner-city kids. His only imperfection had been to smoke that one cigarette — yes, just one, that was all, one; proof that nicotine can be fatal in even minute doses — and it had been forced on him, against his better instincts, by the tobacco companies, and by those… fucking… saxophone-playing camels with the phallic noses; and by him, by Nick Naylor, senior vice president for communications, Academy of Tobacco Studies, Merchant of Death.

  And he could not move. She had epoxied him to his seat. The perfidious bitch had outmaneuvered him!

  In such moments — not that he had experienced this extreme before — he imagined himself at the controls of a plane. Pilots always managed to remain so calm, even when all their engines were on fire and the landing gear was stuck and the Arabic-looking passenger in 17B had just pulled the pin on his grenade.

  He sucked in a lungful of air and let it out slowly, slowly, slowly. That's it. Breathing exercise. He remembered it from Lamaze classes. Still, his heart was going kaboom-kaboom ka-boom in his chest. Would the necktie microphone pick that up? How suave that would be, having his thumping heartbeat broadcast into everyone's living room.

  Maybe he should offer some small sign of comradeship to Cancer Kid. He needed an opening line. So, how long do they give you? Oprah was doing her introduction.

  "Last year, RJR Nabisco, the company that makes Camel cigarettes, launched a new seventy-five-million-dollar ad campaign. The star of the campaign is Old Joe, a camel. But this is no ordinary ruminant quadruped." Shots of Old Joe were shown: playing the sax, playing bass, hanging out at the beach, checking out the chicks, being cool, the old coffin nail hanging jauntily from his mouth, or foreskin, depending on your phallic suggestibility. "He's become very popular, especially among children. According to a recent poll, over ninety percent of six-year olds… six-year-olds, not only recognized Old Joe, but knew what he stood for. He is almost as well-known as Mickey Mouse.

  "Before Old Joe began showing up on billboards and magazine pages everywhere, Camel's share of the illegal children's cigarette market was less than one percent. It is now… thirty-two percent— thirty-two point eight percent, to be precise. That amounts to four hundred seventy-six million dollars a year in revenues.

  "The surgeon general of the United States has called on RJR to withdraw this ad campaign. Even Advertising Age, the top advertising industry trade magazine, has come out against the Old Joe campaign. But the company refuses to withdraw them.

  "Then last Friday she called for a total ban on advertising for cigarettes. Magazines, billboards, everything. This is bound to be controversial. A lot of money is at stake.

  "I want you to meet Sue Maclean, head of the National Organization of Mothers Against Smoking. Sue began organizing NOMAS after her daughter fell asleep in bed while smoking and burned down her dormitory at college. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Sue tells me that her daughter quit smoking right after that."

  Laughter in the studio. Heartwarming.

  "Her daughter is now a mother herself, and a very active member of NOMAS."

  The audience cooed.

  Nick, synapses overheating, tried to coordinate his facial features into an appropriate expression, something between waiting for a bus that was very late and being lowered headfirst into a tank full of electric eels.

  "Frances Gyverson is executive director of the National Teachers' Association in Washington. She is in charge of the NTA's health issues program, which instructs teachers in how to relay the dangers of smoking to their students.

  "Ron Goode is deputy director of the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. OSAP is the command center in the nation's war against cigarettes, so that would make you, what, Ron, a colonel?"

  "Just a foot-soldier, Oprah."

  Where, Nick wondered, was this gorgeous self-effacement coming from? Goode was one of the more pompous, self-important assholes in the entire federal government.

  Oprah smiled. A warm and fuzzy murmur went through the studio audience. He has so much power, and yet look at him, he's so humble!

  She turned toward Cancer Kid.

  "Robin Williger is a high school senior from Racine, Wisconsin. He likes studying history and he is on the swimming team." Momentarily, Nick's heart leapt. Perhaps it had all been a dream. Perhaps he didn't have cancer. Weren't swimmers always shaving their heads for speed? And didn't the weird ones also shave their eyebrows?

  "He was looking forward to continuing his education at college. But then something happened. Recently, Robin was diagnosed with cancer, a very tough kind of cancer. He is currently undergoing chemotherapy treatment. We wish him all the luck in the world." The audience and other guests burst into applause. Nick joined in, wanly.

  "The reason we asked him to be on this show with us is that he started smoking Camel cigarettes when he was fifteen. Because, he told me, he wanted to be quote cool like Old Joe. He also tells me he's quit smoking Camels since learning about the cancer. And that he no longer thinks smoking is quote cool." Thunderous applause.

  Nick yearned for a cyanide capsule. But now Oprah turned to face Nick.

  "Nick Naylor is a vice president of the Academy of Tobacco Studies. You might think with a name like that that they're some sort of scientific institution. But they are the tobacco industry's main lobby in Washington, D.C., and Mr. Naylor is their chief spokesman. Thank you for coming, Mr. Naylor."

  "Pleasure," Nick croaked, though what he was experiencing was far from pleasure. The audience glared hatefully at him. So this is how the Nazis felt on opening day at the Nuremberg trials. And Nick unable to avail himself of their defense. No, it fell to him to declare with a straight face that ze Fuhrer had never invaded Poland. Vere ar
e ze data?

  "Who'd like to start?" Oprah said.

  Nick raised his hand. Oprah and his fellow panelists looked at him uncertainly. "Is it all right," he said, "if I smoke?" The audience gasped. Even Oprah was taken aback.

  "You want to smoke?"

  "Well, it's traditional at firing squads to offer the condemned a last cigarette."

  There was a stunned silence for a few seconds, and then someone in the audience laughed. Then other people laughed. Pretty soon the whole audience was laughing.

  "I'm sorry, but I don't think that's funny," Mrs. Maclean said.

  "No," said the National Teachers' Association lady. "I don't either. I think it's in extremely poor taste."

  "I have to agree," Goode said. "I don't see the humor in it. And I suspect Mr. Williger doesn't either." But Cancer Kid was laughing. God bless him, he was laughing! Nick was seized with love. He wanted to adopt this young man, take him back to Washington, cure him of his cancer, give him a high-paying job, a car — a luxury car — a house, a pool, a big one so he could keep up with his swimming. Nick would buy him a wig, too, and get him eyebrow hair transplants. Anything he wanted. He felt so badly about the cancer. Maybe, with radiation…

  Forget the kid! He's history! Press the attack! Attack! Attack!

  "Oh why don't you leave him alone," Nick wheeled on Goode. "And stop trying to tell him how he ought to feel." He turned to Oprah. "If I may say so, Oprah, that is typical of the attitude of the federal government. 'We know how you should feel.' It's this same attitude that brought us Prohibition, Vietnam, and fifty years of living on the brink of nuclear destruction." Where was this going? And how had nuclear deterrence gotten in? Never mind! Attack! "If Mr. Goode wants to score cheap points off this young man's suffering just so he can get his budget increased so he can tell more people what to do, well I just think that's really, really sad. But for a member of the federal government to come on this show and lecture about cancer, when that same government for nearly fifty years has been producing atomic bombs, twenty-five thousand of them, as long as we're throwing numbers around, Mister Statistics, bombs capable of giving every single person on this planet, man, woman, and child, cancers so awful, so ghastly and untreatable, so, so, so incurable, that medical science doesn't even have a name for them yet… is" — Quick, get to the point! What is the point?—". is just beneath contempt. And frankly, Oprah, I'd like to know how a man like. this comes to occupy a position of such power within the federal bureaucracy. The answer is — he doesn't have to get elected. Oh no. He doesn't have to participate in democracy. He's above all that. Elections? Consent of the governed? Pah! Of the very people who pay his salary? Oh no. Not for Ron Goode. He just wants to cash in on people like poor Robin Williger. Well, let me tell you something, Oprah, and let me share something with the fine, concerned people in the audience today. It's not pleasant, but you, and they, need to hear it. The Ron Goodes of this world want the Robin Willigers to die. Awful, but true. I'm sorry, but it's a fact. And do you know why? I'll tell you why. So that their . budgets" — he spat out the distasteful word—"will go up. This is nothing less than trafficking in human misery, and you, sir, ought to be ashamed of yourself."