A Case of Love at First Puff

My father smoked 10 cigars a day for most of his adult life, but when he quit after having two heart attacks, he told me: “If you ever smoke anything, I’ll break both your arms off and beat you to death with them.”

I was 11 at the time, and that seemed a pretty persuasive reason not to smoke. But my father died in 1969, and almost a dozen years later, on a trip to Switzerland, my wife suddenly suggested that I take up cigar-smoking; she thought it might keep me from drumming my fingers impatiently on the table while she s-l-o-w-l-y sipped her espresso after dinner.

I immediately called my doctor in Los Angeles--leaving my wife at table, with her espresso, in Geneva.

The doc said he didn’t think one cigar a day would pose any threat to my continued good health, so I returned to my wife, grinning, and asked the waiter for a cigar. He brought me one--”a Davidoff, from Havana, the Rolls-Royce of cigars,” he assured me.

I lit up. I liked it. I began smoking a cigar a day, after dinner.

But I only smoked Davidoff occasionally because they were too expensive and, being Cuban, they were illegal (although not unobtainable) in this country.

Then in 1987, Davidoff opened its first store in the United States--in New York--after which came a series of announcements: Davidoff would no longer market Cuban cigars because of concerns over quality control (concerns the Cubans said were not valid). Davidoff would introduce a new line of non-Cuban cigars, handmade in the Dominican Republic; Davidoff would open a store in Beverly Hills, on Via Rodeo, the new, exclusive little street that looks like what Hollywood thinks Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris should look like.

That store opened last month, with Eladio Diaz, a master cigar-maker from Santo Domingo, sitting at his worktable just inside the front door the first few days, adroitly hand-rolling cigars from scratch, as samples for would-be customers.

At a cocktail party and a dinner-dance celebrating the opening of the store, Zino Davidoff, the 85-year-old, Russian-born cigar impresario, regaled guests with tales of how his family made cigarettes in his native Kiev, then in Geneva, and how he left home when he was 18 to spend five years in Latin America studying the cultivation of fine tobacco.

When he returned to Geneva in 1929, he suggested that his father open a cigar section in the family tobacco store. Several years later, when leaders of the Cuban cigar industry worried that Nazis would confiscate the cigars they had stored in Paris, they remembered the young man from Geneva who had asked so many questions and had came to love their cigars so passionately, and they suggested that Davidoff take their cigars to his store instead.

Thus began a relationship that lasted almost 60 years.

“I love Cuban cigars,” Davidoff said. “They’re the best in the world.” But Davidoff also said he had decided to shift his cigar-making enterprise to the Dominican Republic, rather than continue to put his name on an increasingly inconsistent product. He began marketing the Dominican cigars--15 different sizes, blends and tastes--last November as part of the company’s international expansion.

Unlike other Davidoff stores, which also sell cigars by other makers, the new store in Beverly Hills sells only Davidoff cigars--only Davidoff products, tobacco and non-tobacco.

Sometime after Christmas, the store will also have a private smoking club of sorts--a comfortably appointed room above the store where smokers can stretch out on leather armchairs and sofas and sip espresso and cognac while they puff on their cigars and exchange tales of harassment by those in the outside world who seem to break into a splenetic rage at the mere sight of a cigar. The store has a walk-in humidor and will also make private humidors available to customers to store their cigars on the premises.

But why build a new store selling expensive cigars in Beverly Hills now, in the midst of a recession, at a time when cigar sales are continuing to plummet, in a part of the country that has more health and fitness nuts per square bile than virtually any other hamlet in the (theoretically) civilized world?

On Oct. 18, the very day the Davidoff store opened in Beverly Hills, the Los Angeles City Council introduced an ordinance that would prohibit smoking in all restaurants and city government buildings.

Not surprisingly, a Davidoff official extols the virtue of the new Dominican cigars. “Our new cigars are lighter than most Cuban cigars,” he said. “People are eating lighter and drinking lighter. We think they’ll smoke lighter, too.”

OK. But more to the point, the sales of premium cigars have actually been increasing in the United States in recent years. Although overall cigar sales have dropped steadily and dramatically, the sales of cigars costing more than $2.50 each almost tripled between 1987 and 1990, according to the Cigar Assn. of America--much as premium wine sales have been increasing while overall wine sales have been dropping.

Davidoff cigars cost considerably more than $2.50. Their Dominicans generally range from about $5 to $21.50 each. That limits Davidoff to a very small percentage of the total cigar market. But it helps explain why Beverly Hills seems a logical place to find that market, especially on a street across from Tiffany, around the corner from Dior, Cartier, Chanel and Valentino, served by valet car-parkers in bow ties and cummerbunds.

This also helps explain why Davidoff is expanding its offerings. In addition to its full line of tobacco accessories--handmade humidors range in cost from $160 to $15,000 and hold six to 600 cigars--Davidoff now sells cognac, fragrances, ties, wallets, briefcases and leather cases for passports, credit cards, keys and eyeglasses, all displayed in polished, pearwood cases, behind gleaming, tempered glass panels. Indeed, the company is positioning itself alongside neighbors like Louis Vuitton and Cartier--prestige companies selling a whole line of luxury goods bearing its own name.

There’s a certain elitist appeal here. We’re not talking cheap, smelly stogies in the back room. Hence, the company’s marketing slogan--which could be “What this country needs is a good $10 cigar”--is actually “Smoke less but smoke better.”

Meanwhile, three blocks away, on Canon Drive, another cigar store--Nazareth’s--already offers premium cigars, a smoking club, walk-in humidor and private humidors. Won’t the two compete with each other in an already narrow market?

Nazareth Guluzian says his business has dropped about 25% in the last two years because of the recession, but he insists: “Having Davidoff here will help. It will bring in more traffic, more cigar-smokers. The more tobacco shops we have, the better for all of us. We can be a city like London or Geneva.”

Quite so. And I, on my regular Saturday errands with my 2-year-old son, Lucas, in his stroller, can stop by either (or both). Of course, I probably won’t buy much. Ever since California enacted its high tobacco tax in 1988, I’ve been buying my cigars from the Davidoff store in New York. They send them to me Federal Express, and since I don’t have to pay either the tobacco tax or a sales tax, it’s much cheaper than buying here.