STYLE / OBSESSIONS : THE BIG STINK
I once asked a woman I was out with, after dinner, whether she’d mind if I smoked a cigar. “Oh, God, please don’t,” she answered. “I hate cigars. My father smoked them.” A few months later, I had occasion to pose the same question to another woman under similar circumstances. “Go right ahead,” this one replied. “I love cigars. My father smoked them.”
I will leave it to students of another discipline to interpret these responses, but they do make a point: Cigars were something one’s father smoked. Cigars were patriarchal heraldry par excellence--almost ingenuously phallic objects, useful as blazon of prosperity and scepter of authority. They were, in other words, a guy thing.
They still are a guy thing for the most part. But more and more women are buying and enjoying fine cigars themselves. There’s even an association of female cigar lovers hereabouts, called the George Sand Society--in honor of a 19th-Century French novelist who is, frankly, more famous for her cross-dressing and her liaison with Chopin than for anything she wrote. (Be honest now: Can you name even one of her books?) I’m not convinced that Sand is the best possible patron for such a society--sure, she smoked cigars, but she was wearing a man’s suit (not to mention a man’s name) at the time, and I presume that women smoke cigars today for reasons that go beyond mere imitation of masculine behavior--but the very existence of the group is a glowing illustration of an inextinguishable fact: Cigars are hot.
This is pretty curious, if you stop to think about it. No-smoking laws proliferate--smoky old New York passed one of the strictest in the land--and the general public seems to abhor cigars, for their social implications as much as their so-called “stink.” But according to the Cigar Association of America, sales of premium handmade cigars increased almost 15% in this country between 1993 and 1994, and rose 29% for the first four months of this year. The very restaurants that ban the ignition of cigarettes most nights have started closing once a month or so for $150-a-head cigar dinners. There are cigar bars, cigar clubs, cigar cruises. For all I know, there are probably cigar-lovers’ treks to the peaks of Bhutan.
There’s even a thick, slick quarterly called Cigar Aficionado, which combines listings of “cigar-friendly” restaurants and wine-style reviews of cigars (rating them on a 100-point scale and describing their “smooth, creamy texture with strong pepper and spice notes”) with articles on such manly subjects as baseball, sports cars, leather briefcases and the 1988 Playboy Playmate of the Year. The last of these, a robust-looking George Sand Society candidate named India Allen, gives a whole new meaning to the term cigar buff by appearing in the magazine’s Spring 1995 issue in various stages of undress, but never without her Upmann.
Things have clearly come a long way since the days when good cigars were the preserve of bloated plutocrats. What happened first was that all the bloated plutocrats had bypass operations and went to Schick-Shadel or Betty Ford and started popping Omega-3 capsules with their oat bran, with a view to maybe living long enough to see their new wives graduate from high school. All of a sudden, the same guys who used to wave double coronas around like Darth Vader’s light-stick were goose-stepping across the dining room to growl “Will you put that damned thing out?” to anyone who dared brandish a Tiparillo.
But that was the ‘80s. Now you don’t have to be a bloated plutocrat (or have an Adam’s apple) to enjoy one. The bad news is that you might have to sit next to Jason Priestley at one of those cigar dinners if you want to light up.
Priestley is a charter member of Grand Havana Room, a new private cigar-smokers’ store/bar/lounge in Beverly Hills. So are Milton Berle, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kristy Swanson, Dennis Franz and Joe Mantegna, among other notables. Cigars, in fact, seem to be the latest celebrity mania--this year’s personal trainers or Shar-Peis. Whoopi Goldberg and Rush Limbaugh smoke them. So do Demi Moore, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Madonna. Harvey Keitel and William Hurt even make cigar smoking look cool in Wayne Wang’s new film “Smoke,” in which Keitel plays the proprietor of a tobacco shop.
I can’t help wondering, though, how many of today’s high-profile cigar-puffers really light up for the sheer joy of it. How many of them, for instance, actually smoke in private, all alone, when there’s nobody to pose for, nobody to impress? Is there genuine passion involved, or has smoking cigars become sort of like going to see Merchant-Ivory movies--something you do so that people will notice you doing it and think there’s more to you than meets the eye? Do Arnold and Jason and the George Sand crew smoke up a storm in public and then go home, wash their mouths out with 409 and turn on reruns of “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman”?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that cigars have become so popular. It’s good for cigar manufacturers and for shops that sell cigars, and it’s good for those of us who smoke the things. But I can’t help thinking that a fine cigar is a pleasure not necessarily best enjoyed in a room full of other cigar smokers.
Cigars are a simple, personal pleasure, mildly stimulating, splendidly relaxing, conducive to nothing so much as (here’s an old-fashioned concept) contemplation. They have nothing to do with fad or celebrity--except that, like fad and celebrity, they are ephemeral, all too soon gone up in smoke.
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WHERE THERE’S SMOKE:Phillip Dane’s Cigar Lounge 9669 S. Santa Monica Blvd. Beverly Hills (310) 285-9945 Bar and cigar shop.
Hamiltons A Wine Bar. 9713 South Santa Monica Blvd. Beverly Hills (310) 278 0347 Wine bar selling cigars, with humidor upstairs.
Grand Havana Room 301 N. Canon Drive Beverly Hills (310) 446-4925 Private membership lounge. One-time fee, $2000; $150 monthly maintenance.
Remi 1451 Third Street Promenade Santa Monica (310) 393-6545 George Sand Society and Les Amis du Cigars meet here twice a month on alternating Tuesdays. Cigars sold.