COVER STORY : Smoke Rings : Cigars Have Staged a Social and Economic Revival, and Upscale Lounges Have Become Haute Hangouts

Cigars, the odorous pariahs of the anti-smoking age, are rising from the ashes.

In the past, the cigar has typified fat-cat businessmen and back-room dealers. Now, the stogie is staging a social and economic comeback. Sales have surged, and upwardly mobile urbanites find chic pleasure in lighting up.

Not surprisingly, the new popularity of the high-end cigar has triggered a boom in upscale smoking lounges--places that allow the discriminating aficionado to purchase or smoke a cigar in a setting more akin to a gentlemen’s club than to a store.

On the Westside, no fewer than a dozen cigar lounges have opened. Beverly Hills alone has six and counting.

“I feel like Beverly Hills is turning into Cigar World, which is great because it promotes the smoking businesses,” said Lisa Stafford, manager of one local highbrow cigar store and lounge, Davidoff of Geneva.

Last year, cigar sales increased 7.3% from 1993, says Norman Sharp, president of the industry group Cigar Assn. of America.

The trend has lit up concerns from health care professionals, who say cigar smokers face an increased risk of neck, mouth and lip cancers. They also point out the dangers of secondhand smoke.

However, it’s not the fear of carcinogens that dominates the talk in the plush confines of Nazareth’s Fine Cigars, the oldest lounge in Beverly Hills.

Owner Nazareth Guluzian presides in the small salon lined with built-in wooden humidors, talking to customers who relax on a pair of diamond-tucked leather couches.

“As a cigar smoker, I wanted to have a place to smoke and relax. No one had such a place,” said Guluzian, who has been smoking for more than 20 years. He said that when he opened the lounge in 1985, “people were laughing when I put in couches. They said, ‘You think people are going to come and smoke?’ ”

Now Guluzian counts a large clientele, including producer Norman Lear and actors Sylvester Stallone and Nicolas Cage, who rent Guluzian’s private humidors to store their stocks of cigars.

Faced with stringent anti-smoking laws and a public hostile to pungent cigars, lounge patrons say the rooms have become a smoker’s haven.

On one Friday afternoon recently, Nazareth’s was full of men taking a couple of hours off work, chatting with friends from behind clouds of smoke.

“They talk about sports, O.J., whatever is on the news,” said Guluzian. “They try and solve the world’s problems in one day.”

Divorce attorney Marvin Mitchelson, a smoker for 35 years, said he has visited smoking lounges throughout Europe. To him, relaxing with a cigar in a comfortable lounge is therapeutic.

Besides, Mitchelson said, he faces stiff opposition to lighting up a stogie at home.

“My family looks at me with utter contempt,” he said. “I have 29 rooms in my home, and I can’t smoke in any of them.”

So what prompts the new cigar smoker to brave the wrath of family, friends and nearby strangers and fire up a cigar?

Industry experts and smokers themselves give a variety of answers.

It may be the desire to be extravagant, spending $21.45 for an Aniversario No. 1 from Davidoff.

It could be the feeling of camaraderie that cigar smokers enjoy when discussing their favorite Troya clasico or H. Upmann corona major.

Or perhaps the cigar resurgence was triggered by the 1992 arrival of the glossy quarterly magazine Cigar Aficionado. The magazine’s slick profiles of famous cigar smokers, cigar taste-test ratings, and advertisements depicting the rich and successful lent instant glamour to cigar smoking.

Cigars and a cigar smoker’s image can hardly be separated, whether the smoker wants to be identified as a big shot in business or as an affluent rebel.

Reinforcing the image of success is the increasing number of celebrities seen smoking, such as late-night talk-show king David Letterman and actors Bill Cosby, Jack Nicholson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The cigar mania gave the industry a banner year in 1994, when the total number of cigars sold (2.3 billion) increased for the first time after a steady decline since 1970.

However, cigars are still a long way from competing with cigarettes. The cigar industry accounts for only 1.7% ($790 million) of the $47.6 billion spent on all tobacco products, according to 1994 statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Cigarettes account for $44.5 billion in sales.

The strongest growth in the market has come from premium cigars, which cost $1 to $20. They are generally hand-rolled, mostly imported and consist of half leaves of tobacco. Sales of premium cigars, which account for about 6% of total cigars sold, jumped 42% from 1989 to 1994, Sharp said.

In fact, the new demand has outstripped supplies, and buyers face long delays for expensive, hand-rolled cigars. In one Beverly Hills tobacco store, frantic customers had to wait eight months for the favored Miami-made La Gloria Cubana cigar.

Evidence of the broadening popularity of cigars can be seen in the changing demographics as younger men and some women begin to reach for petit coronas or short, fat robustos.

“The younger crowd has really been picking up on this,” said David Peck, manager of Thomas Hinds Tobacconist in Beverly Hills. “When I first started in this [field] six years ago, I thought cigar smoking was an old man’s thing.”

Now, about one-third of his business is from cigar smokers in their 20s and early 30s, Peck said.

And, true to their high-living reputation, Yuppies and 20-somethings are not cheap when it comes to paying for the luxury of a fine cigar.

Peck said he has often suggested a particular cigar to some of the neophyte smokers who come into his shop. Several times after he proposed a brand, the youthful buyer took one look at the price and asked for something more costly.

“They don’t care which [cigars they buy], but they want the most expensive one,” Peck said, adding: “Maybe they’re trying to impress their friends.”

Industry experts agree that there has been a downward shift in the age of the 6 million to 8 million cigar smokers in the United States. In the past, most cigar smokers were 45 to 65. Now, Sharp said, he is seeing more men in their 20s and 30s taking up smoking.

With that generation in mind, Beverly Hills business owner Phillip Dane has opened a lounge he describes as “sort of House of Blues meets cigar smoking.”

“Usually, cigar lounges are pretentious and uncomfortable,” he said. Instead, the 28-year-old Dane said he aims for “more of a hip crowd,” skipping the clubby atmosphere and including backgammon, his own Great Dane and background music by Counting Crows.

Cigar smoking has also won over a growing number of women.

Stafford said she began smoking when she was 21, following the example of her father.

“People used to be incredulous when they saw me smoking a cigar, but more women do it now, so it’s not as strange as it used to be,” Stafford said, drawing on a long, thin Davidoff No. 2.

In 1980, only one-tenth of 1% of all cigar smokers were women. Now they account for nearly 1%, Sharp said.

An increasingly popular venue for women who want to light up a stogie is at cigar or smoker nights--specialty dinners held at upscale restaurants. The dinners are usually elegant affairs that team up courses of gourmet food with a variety of cigars.

Rustica in Beverly Hills is one of several Westside restaurants to host cigar nights. Eight months ago, Rustica began holding smokers’ nights twice a month, charging $65 a person for several cigars and such exotic fare as grilled New York sirloin with gratin dauphinoise, red onion marmalade and a port-thyme sauce.

The dinners have been solidly booked, and a quarter to a third of the patrons are women, said Rustica co-owner James Beriker.

On one recent cigar night, the well-dressed diners took their smoking so seriously that many puffed on their Davidoff cigars between bites of food.

Beriker said cigars have become an important aspect of fine dining. On cigar nights, the food is chosen first; then the wines and cigars are picked to match the menu.

The increase in cigar smoking comes at a time when more restaurants and public facilities are required to limit or ban smoking.

But Rustica, for example, can get around the smoking law by holding cigar night on the restaurant’s walled patio with the retractable ceiling wide open.

A California law that took effect in January prohibits smoking in most enclosed workplaces, which are defined as having four walls and a ceiling. But the law exempts tobacco shops and attached smokers’ lounges.

Health care professionals and anti-smoking activists say they want to warn smokers that cigar smoking causes cancer, even though cigar smoke is not inhaled.

Cigar smokers run a greater risk than cigarette smokers for some types of disease, including cancer of the lip, mouth, larynx and esophagus, said Dr. Vanessa Tatum, spokeswoman for the American Lung Assn. and a pulmonary specialist.

For example, cigars are not filtered, and there is no buffer for the heat of the cigar as it rests on the smoker’s lips, burning and depositing toxins, Tatum said.

Exposure to secondhand smoke is believed to be the third-leading cause of preventable death in the United States, behind actual smoking and use of alcohol, according to the California Department of Health Services.

And plenty of secondhand smoke can be found in lounges and at cigar nights.

The nicotine from cigar and cigarette smoke can linger in a room for two weeks, said Esther Schiller, co-director of Smokefree Air For Everyone.

“Just when you thought it was safe to go out to your favorite restaurant, it turns out they have had a cigar night and the place is filled with the leftover pollutants,” Schiller said. “And especially if you’re a person with asthma or other respiratory problems, you’re in trouble and you don’t know why, since restaurants are supposed to be smoke-free.”

Although cigar lounges are equipped with heavy-duty ventilation, smokers can be lulled into a false sense of security, Tatum said.

Even high-volume air purifiers cannot filter the air fast enough, she said. Humans breathe 18 to 20 times a minute, but a filter can cycle only 12 times a minute.

Anti-smoking activists also worry that glamorization of cigars, especially by Hollywood celebrities, will undermine efforts to discourage youngsters from lighting up.

“Both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Jordan are involved with sports and supposedly lead healthy lifestyles, yet both have appeared on the covers of magazines with their cigars. This is a very confusing message for kids,” said Dr. Trisha Roth, a Beverly Hills pediatrician and anti-tobacco activist.

But despite health concerns, it would appear that cigar smoking is re-entering the mainstream.

Last week, President Bill Clinton and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake puffed cigars on the White House’s Truman Balcony, celebrating the rescue of a downed American F-16 pilot from Bosnian Serb territory.

And Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan was spotted lighting up on cigar night in Schwarzenegger’s Santa Monica restaurant, Schatzi’s on Main.

Industry expert Sharp said it is difficult to predict what will happen in the cigar market. “Honestly, we never saw the increase coming, so it is just impossible to see the future,” he said.

But lounge owner Dane predicts that cigar smoking will be popular for years to come.

“This is the introduction of cigars to a huge number of people,” he said. “These guys who are young and smoking--we may lose one or two. The others are hooked.”