Ode to the Cigar : For Some, Puffing a Stogie Can Be an Almost-Religious Ritual

In an era when cigarettes have become tantamount to nuclear waste, it takes a bit of guts tolight up a cigar.

There is, after all, precious little middle ground for the stogie. You love ‘em or hate ‘em. People see the cigar either as fragrant and satisfying, a spur to conversation and the philosophical mind, or they revile it as an odious clump of noxious weeds.

Consequently, cigar smokers tend to be both devoted and clannish, having felt the same transcendent pleasure in watching a soft cloud of blue smoke curl away from the end of their Montecruz corona and that prickly feeling when the glares of nonsmokers bore in.

In Orange County, encounters among the committed are inevitable, thanks to a former Cuban refugee, a genial hotelier, a growing fraternity of cigar smokers and a social climate in which the cigar is tolerated, if not always embraced.

It isn’t at all unlikely, for instance, that chance meetings of the faithful might occur in a tiny shop on East 1st Street in Santa Ana. It is there that Pablo Frias presses and hand-rolls an average of 400 cigars of various sizes, shapes and blends each day. He is the only cigar maker in Orange County and one of only a handful in the United States.

Frias learned his trade at age 7 when his family lived outside of Havana and his brothers were tobacco planters. He left Cuba in 1955 and set up shop in Miami. He moved to Santa Ana in 1972 and opened the Teri Cigar Co., named for his daughter.

For 17 years, he has been providing tobacco shops throughout the United States--including the one at Disneyland--with his Cubanakan cigars, the best of which are blends of Dominican and Honduran tobaccos. His stock is priced from 75 cents to $2.50 per cigar, and he occasionally rolls individual blends on request.

The process is simple, but elegant. Frias removes the leaves from bales, blends them by hand and fits them into wooden molds, where they are pressed into the various shapes and lengths. The cigars are then removed and Frias deftly encloses them in a wrapper leaf, which he cuts and seals by hand.

Among cigar fans, he is considered a precious commodity. Frias says his handiwork tends to turn up regularly in the pockets of attorneys and others who work at the nearby Orange County Courthouse. And many local residents and business people have remained faithful customers for years.

One of them is Dennis Martin, 48, a Santa Ana real estate appraiser, who said he goes through perhaps 50 of Frias’ larger coronas “every week to 10 days. I like the big ones, and I don’t even know what they call them. They’re pretty good-sized cigars.”

Martin, like many cigar aficionados, never smoked cigarettes (“They just smell dry to me”). Two of his uncles smoked cigars, he said, and when he took up the practice “when I was about 15 or 16,” it was love at first puff.

“I like the smell of it, which a lot of people hate,” Martin said. “And the flavor. A lot of people don’t understand that you don’t inhale them. It’s the flavor from the smoke that does it for you. It’s like eating a good steak.”

Which is exactly what Henry Schielein arranged last April.

Schielein, vice president and general manager of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Dana Point--a man for whom cigar smoking is a pleasure bordering on the religious--has become a kind of patron saint of Orange County cigar lovers, largely as a result of a lavish “smoker” he threw nine months ago at the hotel for 60 lovers of the leaf.

The evening was designed to commemorate the dedication of one of the hotel’s rooms, known as the Library, as a smoking room where pipe and cigar smokers could enjoy their tobacco after dinner in the evenings (during the day, it is used as a nonsmoking tea room).

For $175, the guests got a lavish steak dinner and a chance to fire up (and take home) some of the more than 1,000 cigars provided for the evening by various cigar manufacturers and distributors. Schielein said he wants to make the smoker an annual event, and has scheduled another one for April. He has received several letters from cigar lovers angling for invitations, but he said the guest list will be necessarily limited. He doesn’t want to lose the comradely atmosphere that he says is part of the cigar mystique.

“This is the perfect room for smoking,” said Schielein, waving an arm at the darkly paneled Library. “I think it sets a mood. You don’t light a cigar if you’re in a hurry. You sit back and you enjoy it. You can smoke here without worrying about somebody getting upset. That’s the critical thing. (The Library) has been favorably received because there are an awful lot of guys who like a good cigar.”

Schielein began his love affair with the leaf when he was a 21-year-old steward on a cruise ship that had put into Havana Harbor.

“We got off the ship and hit this bar, the Two Brothers Bar, and inside on the bar there was a box of cigars,” he said. “I’d never had one in my life. I lit one up and fell in love.”

It is, however, not a universal love, as Joseph De Franco, whom Schielein calls “a cigar fanatic,” has found.

“You must take care that you don’t offend someone else,” said De Franco, a Corona del Mar resident who is the president and chief executive officer of a hazardous waste treatment business.

“I’ll always ask permission to smoke them. On several occasions when a restaurant manager has said that smoking was permitted, the owner has come out and said, ‘My God, that’s a terrible smell,’ and so I apologize and let the cigar go out. I don’t want my pleasure to be someone else’s displeasure.”

Still, there are restaurants and hotels in Orange County where cigar smoking is permitted, if on a smaller and less visible scale than at the Ritz-Carlton.

At the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach, for instance, cigar smoking is permitted in the Pavilion dining room and cigars are available to diners on request.

And at the Chez Cary restaurant in Orange, a selection of cigars is kept behind the bar for patrons who ask for them.

Other restaurants, however, forbid cigar smoking. At the Ritz restaurant in Newport Beach “we really discourage cigar smoking,” said day manager Judy Simpson. “It does nothing to enhance your dining. On the menus, we have a little blurb that says that we request that pipe and cigar smoking be confined to the lounge and bar area.”

The European tradition of restaurants routinely offering after-dinner cigars to their patrons is nearly non-existent in America today, Schielein said, and statistics bear that out.

According to the Washington-based Cigar Assn. of America, cigar smoking has been on the decline in the United States, at a rate of about 8% a year since the U.S. surgeon general’s report on smoking was published in 1964. In that year, more than 8.9 billion cigars were sold nationwide. In 1988, that figure had dropped to slightly more than 2.5 billion.

(Health risks are substantially less for cigar smokers than for cigarette smokers, cigar fanciers are quick to point out. An American Cancer Society study published in 1982 found that while the risk of getting any form of cancer is twice as high for cigarette smokers as for nonsmokers, that risk goes up by only a third for cigar smokers.)

Still, new cigar smokers are emerging. “There are a lot of young guys out there who like a good cigar,” Schielein said. “It’s not for old men only.”

Jeffrey Wagner, president of the Cigar Warehouse, a pair of Los Angeles stores specializing in cigars, said his business is “up by about 30% from last year. Our business used to be older men, but we’re getting younger people now. Most of our business is with young executives in their late 20s or early 30s.

“It’s a sign of success to them. Generally speaking, they’re given a promotion, or they see the senior partner smoking a cigar, or they see executives higher up than they are smoking a cigar, or they’re given a cigar at a meeting by someone who has prestige, or they see Bill Cosby or David Letterman or Milton Berle or George Burns smoking cigars and they want to be like these successful people.”

Orange County tobacconists said that they also are serving younger customers and that they generally go for higher-priced imported cigars, some in the $9 to $10 range. Eric Root, manager of the Tinder Box in the Orange Mall, which also sells pipe tobacco, said “29% of my weekly business is in cigars, and that’s a substantial amount of the business we do.”

And, say cigar lovers, the novices eventually find themselves part of a kind of fraternal sub-strata of smokers, with new signs and rituals.

“I smoke a cigar maybe six times a year, and I usually buy them from the Teri Cigar Co.,” said R.D. Ferguson, a 33-year-old investment banker from Anaheim. “And I only do it when I’m with the guys. I never smoke by myself. It’s a cliche, but I suppose it’s just male bonding. And I like the taste. It’s a pleasant bite, and it’s relaxing.”

Few women smoke cigars, but many say they like the smell, Schielein said. And there are others who pursue the leaf more actively.

“No question, there are a lot of women who like good cigars, particularly small cigars,” Schielein said. “In Boston, a group of women have their own little cigar club at the Ritz-Carlton there, and one of the members is Anwar Sadat’s daughter. She’s a cigar fanatic.”

Schielein’s own marriage, he said, was contingent on his wife’s attitude toward cigars.

“I made a deal with my wife before we got married,” he said. “I said, ‘Don’t ever ask me to stop smoking cigars.’ I wouldn’t have gotten married if she had. We’ve been married more than 25 years.”

There is even a kind of missionary zeal among cigar lovers, De Franco believes.

“A cigar smoker will share his leaf with other people,” he said. “I smoke about five or six a day and generally give away that many or more a week.”

And, Schielein said, a kind of collect-’em-trade-’em ritual exists because “a cigar smoker, when he smells a good cigar, is not afraid to come up to you and ask what you’re smoking.”

It all contributes, he said, to a devotion that few inanimate objects enjoy. And it is surely a sign of that deep feeling that Schielein can quote Mark Twain on the subject of cigars and appear to agree with every single word:

“If I cannot smoke cigars in heaven,” Twain wrote, “I shall not go.”