Thank You for Smoking Page 6

  Ron Goode never recovered. For the next hour, he could only scream at Nick, in violation of every McLuhanesque injunction against putting out heat in a cool medium. Even Oprah strained to calm him down.

  For his part, Nick assumed a serene mask of righteous serenity and merely nodded or shook his head, more in sadness than in anger, as if to say that his outburst only validated everything he had said. "All well and fine, Ron, but you haven't answered the question," or, "Come on, Ron, why don't you stop pretending you didn't hear me," or, "And what about all those people you irradiated during those nuclear test blasts in New Mexico? Want to talk about their cancers?"

  During one of the commercials Ron Goode had to be physically restrained by a technician.

  The head of NOMAS and the representative of the teachers' organization did what they could to come to the aid of their federal benefactor, but every time they ventured a comment, Nick cut them off with "Look, we're all on the same side, here," a statement so dazzling that it left them mute. When they finally rejoined that they could not find one square inch of common ground between their humanitarianism and the fiendish endeavors of the tobacco industry, Nick saw his opening and pounced. No one, he said, was more concerned about the problem of underage smoking than the tobacco companies. Not, of course, that there was a shred of scientific evidence linking smoking with disease, but the companies, being socially responsible members of the community, certainly did not condone underage smoking — or drinking and driving, for that matter — for the simple reason that it was against the law. Here was the ideal moment to unveil their new anti-underage smoking campaign.

  "As a matter of fact, we're about to launch a five-million-dollar campaign aimed at persuading kids not to smoke," Nick said, "so I think our money is on the table."

  6

  Nick heard the urgent chirruping on his cellular telephone inside his briefcase when he retrieved it from the greenroom in Oprah's studio, but ignored it. He continued to ignore it on the drive to the airport. The cab driver, half-curious, half-annoyed, finally asked him if he was going to answer it. It pleased Nick to know that BR was going through significant agonies on the other end, so he did not pick up. In the waiting lounge at O'Hare, he did, more because people were staring than because he wanted to put BR out of his misery.

  "Five million dollars?" It was BR, all right. Nick put his blood pressure at about 180 over 120. "Are you out of your mind?"

  "Probably. It's been a very stressful period for me. But I'm feeling much better now."

  "Where in the name of God are we supposed to get five million for, for anti-smoking ads?"

  "It's not all that much when you think about it. RJR is spending seventy-five million a year on those stupid dick-nosed camels. You'll probably get a lot of good press out of this."

  BR was fulminating, making legal threats, saying they were going to put out the story that he was having a nervous breakdown. On and on. It was very satisfying. In the middle of it, Nick heard BR say to someone, "Who? Oh, Jesus." Then he said to Nick, "It's the Captain on line two."

  "Give him my regards."

  "Stay on the line." Nick stayed on, not because BR had asked him,but to see what the reaction would be from the most powerful man in Tobacco to the news that an upstart executive VP had just committed his industry to spending some serious money to alienate potential customers.

  He waited for over ten minutes. They called his flight, but the people at the gate wouldn't let him on while he was using his cellular telephone.

  BR came back on. His voice had changed from open bellowing to ice water squirted through clenched teeth. "He wants to see you."

  "He does?" Nick said. "What about?"

  "How the hell should I know," said BR, hanging up with an emphatic klump.

  There were no direct flights to Winston-Salem from Chicago, so he had to fly to Raleigh. On the way there the woman sitting next to him, heavyset, in her late fifties, with hair of a color not found in nature, kept staring at him as he read, out of habit, from his clipping file, an article in Science magazine entitled "Scientific Standards in Epidemiologic Studies of the Menace of Daily Life."

  "I knowyou," she said accusingly, as if her inability to identify Nick were his fault.

  "You do?"

  "Uh-huuh. You're on the television."

  Nick heard a stirring from the seat behind. What's this? Celebrity in their midst? "Who is it?"

  "I knew I'd seen him."

  "It's whatsis-name, from America's Funniest Home Videos." "What would he be doing going to Raleigh? Anyway, he'd be sitting in First Class."

  "I'm telling you…"

  This happened to Nick fairly often.

  "Yes," he said quietly to the lady.

  "I knew it!" She slapped the issue of Lear's magazine onto her lap. "Studs."

  "Yes. That's right."

  "Oh! You must have been so humiliated when she said that you kissed like a fish."

  "I was," Nick said. "It was hard."

  Taking pity on Nick, she shared her own disappointments in love, in particular those pertaining to her second marriage which was apparently failing. Nick was not good at disengaging himself in these situations. After an hour of sympathetic listening, his neck muscles had hypercontracted into steely knots of tension. He would need a session with Dr. Wheat when he got back. He found himself yearning for a terrorist incident. Fortunately, what the pilot announced as a "severe thunderstorm system" moved in and things got so turbulent inside the cabin that the woman forgot her problems of heart, and left deep fingernail impressions on Nick's left forearm. By the time he checked into the hotel it had been a long day and he was too tired to do anything but drink two beers and eat about four hundred dollars' worth of nuts and pretzels from the minibar.

  His room service breakfast arrived and with it the morning paper, the Winston-Salem Tar-Intelligencer. He flipped it open and to his surprise saw his picture on the front page, in color, beneath the fold. The headline read:

  Fighting Back: Tobacco Spokeman Rips Government "Health" Official For Manipulating Human Tragedy.

  The article fairly glowed with praise for his "courage" and "willingness to cut through the cant." They'd even managed to get a sympathetic quote from Robin Williger in which he absolved Nick of personal responsibility for his cancer and said that people ought to take more responsibility for their own lives.

  The phone rang, and a businesslike woman's voice announced, "Mr. Naylor? Please hold for Mr. Doak Boykin."

  The Captain. Nick sat up. But how did they know where he was staying? There were many hotels in Winston-Salem. He waited. Finally a thin voice came on the line.

  "Mister Naylor?"

  "Yes sir," Nick said tentatively.

  "Ah just wanted personally to say, thank you."

  "You did?"

  "I thought that government fellow was going to have himself a myocardial infarction right there on national television. Splendidly done, sir, splendid. Are you here in town, do I gather?"

  It was a sign of the really powerful that they had no idea where they had reached you on the phone. "Would you lunch with me? They do a tolerable lunch at the Club. Is noon convenient? Wonderful," he said, as if Nick, many levels below him on their food chain, had just given him a reason to go on living. They fought a war over slavery, and yet they were so courteous, southerners.

  He bought USA Today in the lobby on his way out. He found it in the "Money" section, front page, below the fold:

  Tobacco Companies Plan to Spend $5 Million

  ON ANTI-SMOKING CAMPAIGN, SPOKESMAN SAYS

  He read. BR flailed in a vortex of neither-confirming-nor-denying. While many details remained to be worked out, yes, the Academy had always been "in the front" of concern about underage smoking and was prepared to spend "significant sums" on a public-service campaign. Yadda, yadda. Jeannette was quoted saying that Mr. Naylor, who had made the remarkable assertion on the Oprah Winfrey show, was unavailable for comment: "We're not sure exactly wher
e he is at this point in time." She made it sound like he was in a bar somewhere.

  In the cab on the way to the Tobacco Club, Nick reviewed what he knew about Doak Boykin, which wasn't much. Doak — he was said to have changed the spelling from the more plebeian Doke— Boykin was one of the last great men of tobacco, a legend. Self-made, he had started from nothing and ended with everything. Except, evidently, a son. He had seven daughters: Andy, Tommie, Bobbie, Chris, Donnie, Scotty, and Dave, upon whom the burden of her father's frustrated desire for a male heir had perhaps fallen hardest. It was Doak Boykin who had introduced the whole concept of filters after the first articles started to appear in Reader's Digest with titles like "Cancer by the Carton." (The asbestos filter was a particular brainstorm of his, which was now causing Smoot, Hawking many thousands of billable hours in the Liability courts.) As the articles proliferated and the industry found itself in need of a little more presence in Washington, he had founded the Academy of Tobacco Studies to serve, as its charter stated, as "a clearinghouse of scientific information and an impartial and always honest mediator between the concerns and needs of the American public and the tobacco companies."

  The Captain's health was in some question. Rumors abounded. He had collapsed at the Bohemian Grove in California, and had been taken to the hospital in nearby Santa Rosa, where he was rushed into surgery. The young cardiology resident, having been told who his patient was, told the groggy Captain, as he was wheeling him into the OR, that the doctors' nickname for this particular operating room was "Marlboro Country," this being where they usually did the lung cancer surgery. The Captain, convinced he was in the hands of an assassin, tried frantically to signal someone, but the Valium drip had rendered him incapable of coherent speech, and so he was left to flail helplessly and mutely as he was wheeled into the gleaming steel prairies of Marlboro Country. It did not help when he woke up in the recovery room to the news that an anticipated double-bypass had instead required a quadruple-bypass, and that, to boot, an additional discovery of mitral deterioration had required the insertion of a fetal pig's valve into his heart. The Captain, it was said, had left the hospital a rattled man, and had made arrangements that in the event of any further medical problems, he was to be immediately medevacked to Winston-Salem's own Bowman-Gray Medical Center, which had been built entirely with tobacco money. Here he would be safe from further surgical sabotage at the hands of the St. Elsewhere generation.

  Nick arrived for lunch at the Tobacco Club a half hour early. It was a massive Greek Revival affair that had been built by the tobacco barons in the 1890s so that they would have a place to get away from their wives. Nick was shown into a small, well-appointed waiting room. The walls were decorated with expensively framed original artwork for various brands of American cigarettes long since gone up in smoke. There was Crocodile, Turkey Red, Duke of Durham, Red Kamel, Mecca, Oasis, Murad — sweet revenge on the old beheader— Yankee Girl, Ramrod ("Mild as a Summer Breeze!"), Cookie Jar ("Mellow, Modern, Mild"), Sweet Caporal, Dog's Head, Hed Kleer ("The Original Eucalyptus Smoke"). What history was here!

  Nick sat and smoked in a heavy leather armchair and listened to the tick-tock of the giant grandfather clock.

  At one minute to noon the crystal glass swing doors opened and a man of obvious importance walked in, creating a bow-wave of commotion. He was a trim, elegant man in his late sixties, with a David Niven mustache and wavy white hair that suggested a brief, long-ago flirtation with bohemianism. He was not a tall man, but the erect way he carried himself seemed to add several inches. He was gorgeously tailored in a tropical-weight, double-breasted, dark blue pinstripe suit that looked as though it had been sewn onto him at one of those London places like Huntsman or Gieves & Hawkes where you need a social reference from three dukes and a viscount just to get in the door. Pinned to the lapel, Nick noted, was a brightly colored military rosette. The man radiated authority. Porters rushed to relieve him of his hat and silver-tipped cane — did it conceal a sword? — with such solicitude as to suggest that these objects were insupportable burdens. Another porter materialized with a small whisk and began gently to brush the shoulders of the suit. Disencumbered and dusted, this gentleman looked in the direction of the waiting room as a porter inclined to whisper into his ear and to point in Nick's direction.

  He turned and strode, smiling, toward Nick with outstretched hand.

  "Mister Naylor," he said with delight and a sense of moment, "I am Doak Boykin and I am extremely pleased to meet you."

  Faced with such grandeur, Nick mumbled, "Hello, Mr. Boykin."

  "Please," the old man said, "call me Captain." Taking Nick's elbow he steered him to the table in the corner.

  "Punctuality," he grinned, "is the courtesy of kings. Not many northerners appreciate that." One servant pulled his chair out for him as another swiftly removed the starched white napkin from its place setting and in one graceful motion snapped it open and eased it down onto the Captain's lap.

  "Will you join me in a refreshment?" He did not wait for Nick's response. Nothing was said to the waiter, who merely nodded while another momentarily appeared with a tray with two silver cups beaded with condensation and overflowing with crushed ice and fresh sprigs of mint.

  "Mud," the Captain said. He sipped, closed his eyes, and let out a little ah.

  "Do you know the secret to a really good julep? Crush the mint down onto the ice with your thumb and grind it in. Releases the menthol." He chuckled softly. "Do you know who taught me that?" Nick did not, but he supposed some descendant of Robert E. Lee. "Ferdinand Marcos, president of the Philippines."

  Nick waited for elaboration; none came. Another prerogative of the really rich.

  "What year were you born, Mister Naylor?" Should he tell him, Call me Nick?

  "Nineteen fifty-two, sir."

  The Captain smiled and shook his head. "Nineteen fifty-two! Good Lord. Nineteen fifty-two." He took another sip of his julep, crunched down on a chunk of ice, bared his teeth, which were white. "I was in Korea shooting Chinese in nineteen-fifty-two."

  "Really," Nick said, unable to think what else to say.

  "Today, the Chinese are my best customers. There's the twentieth century for you."

  "Seventy percent of adult Chinese males smoke," Nick observed.

  "That is correct," the Captain said. "Next time we won't have to shoot so many of'em, will we?"

  He sat back in his chair, chuckling. "Will you join me in another?" Another tray appeared with more drinks. What was the protocol? Should Nick drain his first one? He did, spilling ice chunks onto his lap.

  "Nineteen fifty-two was a significant year for our business," the Captain continued. "Do you remember what Mr. Churchill said?" The Captain did a growly imitation: " 'It is not the end, or even the beginning of the end. But I believe that it may be the end of the beginning.' Nineteen fifty-two being of course the year the Reader's Digest published that article about the health… aspect." Tobacco executives avoided certain words, like "cancer."

  "That was, you might say, the end of our beginning."

  Lunch was served, much to Nick's relief as he was now woozy with mentholated bourbon. The Captain talked about what the new leadership in Korea meant for the industry. They began with chilled spiced shrimp and moved on to filet mignon and baked potatoes with globs of sour cream. The Captain told the maitre d' that he must never reveal to Mrs. Boykin what he had eaten or, he warned direly, "she'll skin both of us alive." Rich men delight in displaying an exaggerated fear of their wives. They think it humanizes them.

  "Yes sir, Captain!" the waiter said, enjoying his part in the conspiracy of silence.

  "May I?" Nick said, taking out his pack when the plates were cleared.

  "Please, thank you. I'm always so grateful when members of the younger generation smoke." He seemed wistful. "I would join you, but since my recent… experience Mrs. Boykin has become quite vehement on the subject, so I will forgo and forbear, for the sake of domestic tranquillity. My eldest daugh
ter asked me the other day what, at my age, I enjoy, and I told her, 'Voting Republican and being left alone by your mother.' "

  Coffee was served. Other club members stopped by their table to pay court to the Captain, who graciously introduced Nick to them.

  "The Nick Naylor?" one said, grasping Nick's hand. "Well, I am pleased to meet you, sir. Fine job, fine job!" They made quite a fuss over him. It was all very gratifying. Yes, indeed, this was most pleasant. Nick could see living in Winston-Salem, lunching at the Tobacco Club, not having to apologize or justify his existence all the time. "Tobacco takes care of its own," went the saying. Yes it did, it certainly did.

  "I'd say you've made a splendid impression, Nick," the Captain glowed as the last of Nick's admirers had receded. "May I call you Nick? I do not usually engage in diminutives, but in this case I would like to. You remind me just a little bit of myself when I was your age."