Don’t Hold Your Breath

The actress Loni Anderson is in a hotel bar off Rodeo Drive on a weekday afternoon, sipping a diet soda. She doesn’t drink or smoke. Once upon a time, plumes and fumes would have been wafting toward her table from every ashtray in this room. Cigarettes are scarcely seen in Beverly Hills outdoors now, much less in.

“My dad gave me one when I was 12,” Anderson remembers.

They were living in St. Paul, Minn., where the air outside the house was fresh.

It was a different story indoors. Andy Anderson was a chemist by trade, but nicotine was his hobby. He chain-smoked cigarettes from the moment he stopped coughing long enough to put one in his mouth. Maxine, his wife, never complained. She was busy lighting up her own.

Anderson tried acting grown-up and glamorous like them. “I was pretending to smoke a candy cigarette when my dad caught me. He said, ‘Here, why don’t you smoke one of these?’ ”

She took a puff.

Pretty soon there were three people in the Anderson house who were coughing.

*

A man at the table nods at what he is hearing. His father had smoked a couple of packs of Camels each day. Then came 12 years of emphysema, then death from lung cancer. His grandfather went the same way.

“How old were they?” Anderson asks.

In their 70s.

“You’re lucky they lived that long.”

Andy Anderson was in his early 30s when he went to a doctor, unable to shake a cold. He was diagnosed with chronic bronchitis. The doctor asked how long he’d been smoking. Since 15, Andy said.

Maxine began at 11.

The daughters of the Andersons weren’t distressed by their parents’ smoking. Not at first.

It didn’t upset Loni or her sister, Andrea, when they would enter their parents’ bedroom, awaken their mother and watch her take a cigarette off the night stand. Loni then began to notice other things--like what was happening to her mother’s hats.

“She wore these big, beautiful hats out in public, as women of that generation would do. I would see my mother sitting somewhere, smoking a cigarette, with her hand up like this,” Anderson says, raising her right arm, fingers in a V, with her left wrist tucked below her right elbow.

“We’d see her lit cigarette burning a hole, right into the brim of her hat.”

It was a small danger sign.

The coughing was worse. Anderson’s father hacked from morning till night. It would take him 15 minutes to an hour to get rid of the phlegm before he could dress for work. His daughters knew that sound. Loni called it their alarm clock.

Andy’s health deteriorated. A doctor warned him to stop smoking or face the inevitability of an oxygen tank. So he quit. He just didn’t know what to do with his hands.

“He kept reaching into his shirt pocket,” Loni says, “for cigarettes that weren’t there.”

At 53, suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as well as prostate cancer, Andy Anderson was about to die. He decided smoking could do no more harm. A nurse stood by his bed daily until the end, passing a cigarette to his lips with a pair of tweezers.

He died too young to see his grandson Quinton, now 11, or even see the television series “WKRP in Cincinnati,” his daughter’s best-known work. Both he and his wife died of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the fourth-leading cause of death among Americans each year.

“Smoker’s lung,” some call it.

Loni Anderson is no anti-smoking crusader. She doesn’t go from corner to corner in Beverly Hills, preaching. She isn’t selling anything.

It’s just that on the table in front of her--where an ashtray once would have been--is something she thinks people could use.

*

Smokers won’t quit just because some actress says they should. Anderson doesn’t delude herself.

“Although I honestly don’t understand why anyone would still want a cigarette,” she says. “It’s like saying, ‘Here’s a rattlesnake. Hold it.’ And they do.”

What she does understand is that among millions with lung diseases, many have difficulty using inhalers. Some lack the strength to manually use a metered-dose aerosol. They require nebulizer machines that take 10 to 15 minutes per treatment, up to four times daily.

Anderson’s parents avoided nebulizers because they were too much trouble. Her mother declined until an ambulance took her away to use one at a hospital.

Made aware recently of a new inhaler adapter that is considerably easier to squeeze, Anderson--she has asthma herself--jumped at a chance to increase public awareness of it. Thirty thousand have been distributed free of charge to physicians by the Boehringer Ingelheim pharmaceutical house that developed it. Doctors carry them, not stores.

Anderson sprays a mist of inhalant into the smoke-free Beverly Hills air.

“We wouldn’t have so many people who need this if they would just please stop smoking in the first place,” Anderson says, probably wasting her breath.

*

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com.