BR did not offer Nick coffee from his pot, despite the fact that it was six-thirty on a Monday morning. He did not bother with "Good morning," only "I really hope you've got something for us, Nick. A lot depends on it."
"Good morning," Nick said, anyway.
"I'm listening." BR was signing things, or pretending to sign things.
"Could I get some coffee?" "I'm listening," BR said.
Better skip the coffee. Nick sat, took a deep breath. "Movies."
"I don't have time for Socratic dialogue, Nick. Get to the point."
"That is the point."
BR looked up slowly. "What?"
"I think movies are the answer to our problem."
"How?"
"Do you want the reasoning behind it? I could put it in a memo." "Just tell me."
"In 1910," Nick said, "the U.S. was producing ten billion cigarettes a year. By 1930, we were producing one hundred twenty-three billion a year. What happened in between? Three things. World War I, dieting, and talking pictures."
BR was listening.
"During the war, it was hard for soldiers to carry pipes or cigars on the battlefield, so they were given cigarettes. And they caught on so much that General Pershing sent a cable to Washington in 1917 that
said, 'Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration. We must have thousands of tons of it without delay.' " Nick left out the detail that it was in 1919, just after the war, that the first cases of an up-to-then nearly unheard of illness called lung cancer began to show up. The chairman of a medical school in St. Louis invited his students to watch him do the autopsy on a former doughboy because, he told them, they'd probably never see another case of it again.
"So now the men are smoking cigarettes. In 1925, Liggett and Myers ran the Chesterfield ad showing a woman saying to a man who's lighting up, 'Blow some my way.' It broke the gender taboo. But it wasn't until a few years later that we really gave women a reason to want to smoke. George Washington Hill, who's just inherited the American Tobacco Company from his father, is driving in New York City. He's stopped at a light and he notices a fat woman standing on the corner gobbling chocolate, cramming it down. A taxi pulls up and he sees this elegant woman sitting in the back and what is she doing? She's smoking a cigarette, probably one of Liggett and Myers' Chesterfields. He goes back to the office and orders up an ad campaign and the slogan is born, 'Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.' And suddenly the women are lighting up. And they've been puffing away ever since. As you know, they're about to become our most important customers. By the mid-nineties, for the first time in history, there will be more women smokers than men."
BR shifted in his chair.
"What else is happening around then? The talkies. Talking pictures—1927, Aljolson. Why was this significant? Because now directors had a problem. They had to give actors something to do while they talked. So they put cigarettes in their hands. Audiences see their idols — Cary Grant, Carole Lombard — lighting up. Bette Davis — a chimney. That scene where Paul Henreid lights both cigarettes for them in his mouth at the end of Now, Voyager? Pioneered the whole field of cigarette sex. And Bogart. Bogart! Do you remember the first line Lauren Bacall says to him in To Have and Have Not, their first picture together?"
BR stared.
"She sort of shimmies in through the doorway, nineteen years old, pure sex, and that voice. She says, 'Anybody got a match?' And Bogie throws the matches at her. And she catches them. The greatest screen romance of the twentieth century, and how does it begin? With a match. Do you know how many times they lit up in that movie? Twenty-one times. They went through two packs in that movie."
"Now she's hawking nicotine patches," BR said. "Where is this all leading?"
"Do you go to the movies, BR?"
"I don't have time for movies."
"Perfectly understandable. With your schedule. Point is, these days when someone smokes in a movie, it's usually a psychopathic cop with a death wish, and then by the end he's given it up because he's adopted some cute six-year-old orphan who tells him it's bad for him. Sometimes, rarely, you get a situation where the smokers are cool or sexy, like in that TV show, Twin Peaks. But it's never mainstream. It's always" — Nick made quote marks with his fingers—" 'arty.' But nine times out often, they're deviants, losers, nutcases, convicts, and weirdos with bad haircuts. The message that Hollywood is sending out is that smoking is uncool. But movies are where people get their role models. So. "
"So?"
"Why don't we see if we can't do something about that?" "Like what?" BR said.
"Get the directors to put the cigarettes back in the actors' hands. We're spending, what, two-point-five billion a year on promotion. Two-point-five billion dollars at least ought to buy lunch out there."
BR leaned back and looked at Nick skeptically. He sighed. Long and soulfully. "Is that it, Nick?"
"Yes," Nick said. "That is it."
"I'll be frank with you. I'm not blown away. I was hoping, for your sake, to be blown away. But," BR sighed for effect, "I'm still on two legs, standing."
Sitting, actually. It was Nick who was being blown — or swept— away. Pity, too. He thought the Hollywood idea had possibilities.
BR said, "I think we need to rethink your position here."
So, there it was, the handwriting on the wall, in large, blinking neon letters: you're history, pal.
"I see," Nick said. "Do you want me to clear out my desk before lunch, or do I have until five?"
"No no," BR said. "Nothing has to happen today. Jeannette will need you to show her where everything is. Why don't you go ahead and do the Oprah show."
Nick wondered if he was supposed to thank BR for being so magnanimous. "Oh," BR said, "if you see an opening, you can go ahead and announce that we've committed five hundred grand to an anti-underage smoking campaign."
"Five hundred. thousand?"
"I thought you'd be pleased," BR gloated. "It was your idea. It wasn't an easy sell in Winston-Salem. The Captain called it 'economic suicide,' but I told him you thought we needed a little earnest money so people will know that we care about kids smoking."
"Five hundred thousand dollars isn't going to impress anyone. That'll buy you a couple of subway posters."
"It's the idea that counts." BR smiled. "Better hurry or you'll miss your plane."
On the way out it occurred to Nick to buy some flight insurance in case BR had already canceled his benefits.