Pc Can't Extinguish Cigar Lovers

As you know, anyone who smokes a cigarette, much less a cigar, is a social pariah these days. He or she is shunted outside . . . no ashtrays are available . . . people shriek at the hint of "secondhand smoke."

The other night a friend brought over a video of an old film, "The Last Hurrah." As you may remember, this was a portrayal of how the Irish Catholics held political power in Boston, driving the Brahmins nuts.

Spencer Tracy was wonderful as the machine politician, Mayor Skeffington. Eddie Brophy, as a ward heeler, also was a cigar-smoking wonder; so was that most professional Irishman: Pat O'Brien.

They all smoked cigars. You could scarcely see the actors through clouds of cigar smoke that filled every room.

Only in old movies do you see much smoking on screen. Gone are the cigar puffers, including Groucho Marx.

My connection with stogies is somewhat tenuous. But I'm beginning to think there's a whole cigar culture out there, a sort of puffing, underground cult that refuses to change in the face of modern medical evidence.

Case in point: I dropped into Alfred Dunhill on Pike Street to say hello to Hiroe Keeler, a friend of mine who works there. Almost in passing, Keeler mentioned that she was going to a "black-tie cigar dinner" at the Four Seasons Olympic.

Halfway home, I clapped hand to forehead and exclaimed, "What did she SAY?"

Later I checked with the store manager, John Hepler. He confirmed the unbelievable.

There was, indeed, a black-tie dinner for Dunhill's steady cigar fanciers. "We had 82 guests," Hepler confirmed. "It was a splendid occasion."

I find it hard to imagine anyplace these days where a party is scheduled for the avowed purpose of filling a room with cigar smoke. But so it was.

In the Four Seasons' Metropole Room, 82 black-tied guests dined and smoked. Hepler, whose idea it was, says the dinner was put on by Alfred Dunhill, the famed tobacconists, and the Opus One Winery in California.

"We had cigars for cocktails, during dinner, and with after-dinner port," he said. "We had Dunhill Aged Condado cigars with single malt Scotch. We had Dunhill Aged Tabaras with dinner and Cohiba Esplendido with Graham Port."

Later I went to visit my friend David Ishii - the only cigar-lover I know - at his bookstore in Pioneer Square. David does not smoke cigarettes. He has about one cigar per week. He is also the only person I know who subscribes to Cigar Aficionado, a magazine devoted solely to cigar smoking.

In one essay, Cigar Aficionado gave a batch of figures. One stands out: "The biggest chunk of the readership - more than 50 percent - have net worths exceeding $500,000, while 38 percent are millionaires." David is not among the millionaires.

This recalls that the traditional image of cigars is that they were often smoked by fat capitalists. Cartoonists belabored them.

This kid is not pushing people to smoke cigars. But they are interesting. From the time when somebody (can't remember who) said, "What America needs is a good 5-cent cigar," I have thought of them in sloganeering terms. "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke," goes another historic saying.

I disremember the author. But I have always felt that this statement, chauvinistic as it sounds, is really plaintive - the sigh of a rejected suitor, making do with a stogie instead of his beloved.

Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday and Thursday in the Local section of The Times.