Thank You for Smoking

"I'm on SAFETY!" Polly said, doing a take on the famous SAFETY ads showing macho, if slightly fading, actors standing on skeet ranges, holding expensive, engraved shotguns.

"Polly," Nick rebuked her. She was so cynical, Polly. Sometimes Nick wanted to spank her. She made a big-deal gesture. Bobby Jay was oblivious, staring at the center of the table. Polly waved a hand back and forth in front of his face and said to Nick, "I think he's going into shock."

"Oh my Lord," Bobby Jay said quietly, "the video."

"You probably want to recall it," Nick said, but Bobby Jay was already out the door, on his way, it appeared, to a long afternoon of certain buttlock.

3

W hile you were out a producer for the Oprah Winfrey show had called to ask if Nick would go on the show in Chicago on Monday afternoon. The SG's call for an outright ad ban was getting a lot of play, and Oprah wanted a show on smoking right away. Nick called back immediately to say that, yes, he'd be available. This was face time, major face time. Millions and millions of women — tobacco's most important customers — watched Oprah. He was tempted to pick up the phone and tell BR, but decided to play it cool and conduct a little experiment. He called Jeannette and, in the course of asking her about some routine stuff, slipped it in. "Oh, I almost forgot, I have to do the Oprah show on Monday, so can you get me everything we have on the ineffectiveness of advertising?"

He set the timer on his watch. Four minutes later BR was on the line wanting to know what the deal with the Oprah show was. Nick laid it on a bit about how he'd been "cultivating" one of the producers for a long time and it had finally paid off.

"I was thinking maybe we should send Jeannette," BR said.

Nick ground his jaw muscles. "It's going to be a pretty splashy show. Top people. They made it pretty clear that they want the chief spokesman for the tobacco industry." Not your office squeeze.

BR said with an edge, "All right," and hung up.

His mother called to remind him that he and Joey had not been by for Sunday supper in over a month. Nick reminded her that the last time he had, his father had called him a "prostitute" at the table.

"I think it says how much he respects you that he feels he can speak

to you so frankly," she said. "Oh, by the way, Betsy Edgeworth called this morning to say she saw you on C-SPAN talking about some Turkish sultan. She said, 'Nick's so attractive. It's such a shame he didn't stay in journalism. He might have had his own show by now.'"

"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. "Fridays. of course."