Clearing the Air : Smoking: At most charity functions, the practice of lighting up a cigarette or cigar after dinner is headed for extinction.

In 1987, when Beverly Hills officially banned smoking in the city’s restaurants, the ordinance excepted the city’s banquet halls and hotel ballrooms, frequent venues for large charitable and social events. The ban lasted 2 1/2 months.

Recently, City Councilman Marvin Braude proposed an ordinance to make all Los Angeles restaurants nonsmoking, although ballrooms and banquet halls may again be exempted if the ordinance is adopted.

One organization has taken matters into its own hands. On June 1, the American Cancer Society adopted a statewide resolution banning smoking at all its public charity events.

“In the past, we’ve always verbally requested that people not smoke at fund-raising occasions,” said Jane Z. Cohen, director of marketing and communications for the Los Angeles Coastal Cities Unit of the American Cancer Society. “Now we have a formal policy.” According to Dave Bonfilio, who served on the committee that drafted the policy, “We’re not going to put it on invitations. Instead, we won’t put out ashtrays, and will have ‘Thank You For Not Smoking’ signs on the tables. If we’re in a hotel and someone lights up, we’ll ask them to step into the hallway. If we’re outdoors, we’ll ask them to move away from the immediate vicinity.”

However, the point may be moot, because social pressure seems to be accomplishing what legislation and formal rules never could. At many premieres and galas, the practice of lighting up a cigarette after dinner, or passing around a pocketful of Havana cigars--like prime rib, baked Alaska and ruffled tuxedo shirts--seems to be headed for extinction.

“It always comes down to having to sneak at least one cigarette during the evening,” Josh Mooney said with a groan. An editor whose job takes him out on the social circuit several times a week, Mooney said he smokes occasionally at the table, but admitted, “These days, sometimes you have to duck out for one cigarette with the valet parkers.”

Michael Alese, director of catering at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel, supports Mooney’s claim. “People are much more conscious of smoking nowadays,” Alese said. “There’s more of a call for not setting ashtrays on tables. Especially at a social party such as a wedding, the mother and the father of the bride quite often request smoking only out in the cocktail reception area.”

Although approximately 425 municipalities in the U.S. have passed smoking regulations, none of them have banned smoking in banquet rooms for private functions, according to Mark Pertschuk, executive director of the Berkeley-based Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights.

“Obviously, it’s up to the person in control of the facility to set the policy,” Pertschuk said.

Kathy Carpenter, catering manager at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, said that such groups as the City of Hope that rent the hotel’s ballroom often request that ashtrays be placed only in the foyer area.

“At nonsmoking events, I’ve gone up and asked the guests to please refrain from smoking, but there are those who feel that they’ve paid X-amount of money and they have a right to do whatever they want,” Carpenter said.

Some places where parties are held have traditionally permitted smoking, while others have not. Most art galleries strictly prohibit smoking during receptions, due to limited ventilation and the fact that smoke can be as damaging to artworks as it is to humans. At the Ace Gallery, which held a well-attended benefit auction for Project Angel Food last month, smokers who couldn’t wait had to go downstairs and puff outside on Wilshire Boulevard.

Private clubs, with their discotheque/bar atmospheres, have always been thick with smoke. At a recent party for California Abortion Rights Action League at Vertigo, guests felt free to light up without question.

But at black-tie dinners and other galas, it’s hard to imagine a scene like the one several years ago at the annual Las Floristas Headdress Ball at the Beverly Hilton, when one guest brought a pocketful of expensive Macanudo cigars and passed them around after dinner. Despite grumblings from wives and dates, no serious complaints were registered, and the table was engulfed in smoke as the headdress show began.

Despite the changes in smoking habits, however, some benefit organizers still seem loath to ban smoking altogether.

“My own preference is that I would prefer to set down a rule,” said Susan Nessim, founder of the cancer survivors’ organization Cancervive. “But I’ve never seen anybody light up at any of our events.”

Cancervive held its “Laugh for Life” benefit featuring comedians last week at the Westwood Playhouse. A pre-show reception and after-party were held outdoors, but no one smoked. “Just given the fact that everyone in our organization has fought this disease, gone through chemotherapy and radiation and drugs, it would be highly inappropriate to smoke,” says Nessim, who calls the group’s policy “an unspoken thing.”

Smoking appears to be socially declasse across the country. Due to the fact that restaurants in New York are generally more compact than those in Los Angeles and tend not to have outdoor areas, nonsmokers often have to cough and bear it at social events. But that too, seems to be changing--albeit not as drastically as in California.

“I’m a smoker, and I know from personal experience I’ve had to conceal it,” said Giselle Benatar, who once covered social events for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner before moving to Manhattan.

Now the editor for Vogue magazine’s “Talking Fashion” section, Benatar said, “Smoking’s not part of the sophisticated image any longer, especially in the fashion world. I’ve been at parties where it’s still acceptable after dinner. It’s definitely more lenient here than in California.”

Houston Post social columnist Betsy Parrish, a smoker, says, “We’re fighting a losing battle.”

Recently, Parrish and a male friend were dining in the smoking section of Tony’s, a tony Houston restaurant, when a man from the nonsmoking section came over to ask them to extinguish their cigarettes. Parrish’s friend refused, and, in her words, “things almost came to fisticuffs.”

Benatar and Parrish agree on one thing: Though smoking restrictions in their cities have tightened in recent years, California is still the bellwether for nonsmoking policies on the social circuit.

“Most of my friends from California don’t smoke,” said Parrish, while Benatar noted, “In New York, restaurants are generally smoking, because there’s no room for nonsmoking. Mortimer’s, for instance, is a tiny little room. Things here are definitely more lenient than California. Lots of people still smoke, especially writer and artist types. It’s part of the unhealthy, intellectual kind of image, I guess.”

If smokers find it difficult to get by in banquet rooms, the prospect of going to a party at a private home where smoking is not allowed rouses panic, and in some cases, indignation.

Joanne Kozberg, president of the Music Center support group Blue Ribbon estimates that, “only a fraction” of the women in the organization are smokers. “I don’t like smoking, but I allow people to smoke in my home,” said Kozberg, who will bring out ashtrays for those who ask.

“We don’t even have objects that give the appearance of an ashtray in our home, and I think people are very cognizant that you don’t allow smoking when they don’t see ashtrays,” says the Blue Ribbon’s Carolyn Miller, who has banned smoking in her home for more than six years.

Miller, who chaired this year’s American Heart Assn. Heart Ball (where, by the way, smoking was tolerated), says she and her husband, Chuck, made the decision for health reasons. All their parties are nonsmoking, and when a relative came to stay with them during the 1984 Olympics, he was asked to go outside to smoke. The Millers even ask for nonsmoking hotel rooms when they travel, and Chuck, as chairman and CEO of Avery International, has banned smoking at Avery’s offices around the world.

“It bugs me terrifically when I arrive at a home for a party, and there’s a note on the door saying ‘Thank you for not smoking,’ ” said Parrish. “I guess I’m one of those people who thinks that if you don’t want that, you shouldn’t open your house to guests. I was at a party like that recently, and all the smokers ended up in a group on the back porch.”

Mooney said he generally tries not to smoke at parties held in private homes, “for fear of offending someone and never working in this town again.”

And Benatar said that people in New York, like those in Los Angeles, are even resorting to the traditional teen-age method: sneaking a smoke.

“I was at a party in the Hamptons recently. The crowd was young; everyone was dressed in white and the girls were wearing summer dresses, and no one was smoking. But the women’s bathroom was just a crush of people, and that’s where everyone went to smoke.”

Smokers and nonsmokers alike have developed ingenious ways of coping. Jack Nicholson has been spotted on the town carrying his own personal pocket ashtray. On the other side of the matter, Larry Hagman has been known to carry a battery-operated fan to blow smoke back in the smoker’s face.

Celebrities who smoke usually prefer not to be photographed with a cigarette, Carpenter said.

“At one banquet, I had one really hot star sitting at the honorees’ table who kept running backstage every five minutes to smoke,” she said. “It’s not a good image, I guess.”

According to Mooney, “At plenty of parties at producers’ and directors’ homes, you really have to go out of your way to find an ashtray, which is a pretty good sign they don’t want you smoking there. I try to be pretty sensitive about other people’s wishes.”

Like Mooney, most party-going smokers seem to be conscious of nonsmokers around them. Alese said that “you can tell there’s been a tremendous decrease in the amount of smoking just by the air in the ballroom when the party’s over.”

“I’ve become fast friends with the people I see smoking (on the social circuit),” Parrish said. “You see so few of us nowadays.”

Said Mooney, laughing, “If you have to sneak out 10 times during the evening for a cigarette, you do begin to feel pretty silly.”