Thank You for Smoking

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 where 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.