Tobacco Road : Health: The grandson of R. J. Reynolds has battled the industry his ancestors helped created. He supports a proposed ban on smoking in L.A. restaurants.
Patrick Reynolds may never eat lunch in this town again.
Reynolds, a customer in some of Los Angeles’ finest eateries, has gone up against those restaurants in his crusade against public smoking. As the grandson of R. J. Reynolds--a man who persuaded millions to walk a mile for a Camel--Reynolds is an unlikely but formidable nicotine nemesis. He is among the supporters of Councilman Marvin Braude’s proposed ban on smoking in Los Angeles restaurants. In City Council meetings, the 43-year-old Reynolds can be found in the opposite corner from the likes of restaurateur Wolfgang Puck.
Although Puck may not agree with Reynolds in the council chamber, it has had no effect on his ability to get a nice corner table.
“He is absolutely always welcome here,” said Spago maitre d’ Bernard Erpicum. “Mr. Reynolds is a very good customer.”
The council vote on Braude’s proposal, which in addition to banning restaurant smoking would snuff out smoking in the city’s government buildings, is scheduled for March 3. Both Reynolds and Puck plan to be there.
City law now requires Los Angeles’ 11,000 restaurants to set aside 50% of seating for nonsmoking patrons. Any restaurant may ban smoking voluntarily.
Reynolds’ politics, while seeming at odds with his social life, has widened his fame further than the Reynolds’ moniker alone. The hundreds of media credits he lists include all the major television networks, U.S. newspapers, Germany’s Der Spiegel, the Times of London and France’s Le Monde.
The Beverly Hills resident has labored since 1986 to dismantle the tobacco industry his ancestors created. He began by testifying before Congress for a ban on cigarette advertising.
Reynolds, who had been an aspiring actor, set aside his career to hit his version of tobacco road, speaking before medical associations, hospitals, universities and a score of state legislatures. Along the way, he founded the nonprofit Foundation for a Smokefree America.
Reynolds said he’s ready for a change.
“I’m not cut out for nonprofit work,” he admitted. “I just don’t like to go out and ask people for $100,000.”
Reynolds advocates limiting American cigarette exports and curtailing advertising in Asia and the Third World. He also wants an advertising ban in the United States, tax increases and a ban on the sale of tobacco to people under 21.
Reynolds said lobbying efforts for the Los Angeles proposal will include hammering home “the fact that restaurants are liable to pay for the damages caused by secondhand smoke.”
Reynolds cites the case of a nonsmoking waiter in Sausalito who was awarded an $85,000 workers’ compensation settlement in 1990 after claiming his heart attack was induced by secondhand smoke at his workplace. He said the numbers of similar cases are on the rise nationwide.
Opponents of the smoking ban, including restaurant owners, tobacco industry lobbyists and the 3,000-member California Restaurant Owners Assn., argue that it is unfair to single out the restaurant industry.
“We oppose any ban that singles out restaurants,” said Alberta Hultman, the spokeswoman for the restaurant association. “Smoke in restaurants is no worse than smoke found in bingo halls or bowling alleys.”
And, she added, targeting one city is “like asking the hospitality industry to be inhospitable to its customers.”
“Los Angeles is not an island,” she said. “With a ban, people will go to Glendale. Why not just ban it statewide?”
Reynolds said such reactions are typical of the “hysteria generated by the tobacco industry as a ploy to get the City Council to vote down the ordinance. They know exactly which emotional buttons to push.”
No Reynolds family member has held a significant post at R J Reynolds in 50 years.
Reynolds sold his family’s tobacco stock in 1979. “I was making big profits off a product I knew was causing addiction and death,” said Reynolds, adding that he completed the transaction with a cigarette in one hand and a phone in the other. He said he conquered a 10-year, pack-a-day smoking habit in 1984 after a dozen stabs at quitting using various stop-smoking schemes.
He meets his expenses with the proceeds of his speaking engagements, for which he charges from $1,500 to $10,000, leaving what is left of the $2.5 million he inherited from his grandmother to accrue interest.
Despite the familial connection, tJ Reynolds Tobacco company regards the founder’s grandson as “any other member of the anti-smoking industry,” said spokeswoman Maura Payne. “I’m sure he garners more attention than others, but we’re opposed to the zealotry the anti-smoking industry espouses, regardless of who espouses it.”
Reynolds’ family medical history has given him cause for passion. “My only memories of my father are of a man lying on his back, dying from emphysema,” said Reynolds, whose father, R. J. (Dick) Reynolds Jr., was a heavy smoker of family brands Camel and Winston. Grandfather R. J. Reynolds died of cancer of the pancreas in 1918 after a lifetime spent chewing tobacco. Patrick Reynolds’ mother, a smoker, died of heart disease, and two aunts, also smokers, died of cancer and emphysema.
His rented, three-bedroom home resembles a command post more than a Beverly Hills showcase. There are offices in two of the bedrooms, the dining room and the garage. A copy machine stands ready in the kitchen’s breakfast nook.
Among volumes on smoking, Reynolds’ bookshelves reveal a preponderance of recovery movement literature--tomes penned by John Bradshaw and flyers about inner-child retreats and men’s drumming gatherings.
Reynolds said he was surprised to find himself “looking for the wild man within” and his search for wholeness. The journey, he said, stems from a childhood spent without his father. His parents divorced when he was 3.
“Fathers haven’t been there to guide and rear their sons, even if they never went away, like my father did,” Reynolds said. R. J. Reynolds Jr. disinherited his six sons, leaving his fortune to the last of his four wives. “It’s one of the supreme mysteries of my life,” Reynolds said.
His conversations are filled with sound bites: “If the hand that once fed me is the tobacco industry, then that same hand has killed millions of people and will continue to kill millions.
“I’ll always do some form of this work,” said Reynolds, standing before a framed copy of “The Gilded Leaf,” a book he wrote in 1989, summing up three raucous generations of the Reynolds family. “But it’s time for a change. I’d like to go back into acting. I even considered running for Congress a few months back. I’m at a real crossroads.”
But Reynolds said that he looks forward to rankling the tobacco industry at the March 3 council meeting.
It will be one more clash in what he calls a lifetime effort, even if he should stop speaking full time. “I’ve had a passion for this,” he said, winking a slate-blue eye. “I’ve always followed my passions.”
