Commentary -- Hollywood Fans Flames Of New Smoking Craze

For those watching it on television, a standout moment of the 1996 Democratic Party Convention was Vice President Al Gore's story about losing his sister, a longtime smoker, to lung cancer.

Many who heard Gore's speech were moved, and roused by President Clinton's pledge to fight teen smoking. But at least one 22-year-old college student who tuned in thought Clinton and Gore were wasting their breath.

She is not alone. As health crusaders combat the rise in smoking among youth with medical data and dire warnings, and President Clinton seeks new regulations to restrict tobacco sales and promotion, American pop culture (especially Hollywood) keeps sending a different message: Smoking is still very, very cool, and very, very sexy.

"All my friends have smoked, or are still smoking, and nothing these politicians say is going to make any difference," my young friend told me. "This is not something the government should waste a lot of time on, because the more adults tell kids not to smoke, the more they'll do it anyway."

While not all her peers would agree, you don't have to look far for signs that smoking is up among teenagers and young adults. Walk into any student pub in the University District, or any coffeehouse where tobacco is allowed, and a thick haze of pungent smoke enfolds you. Glance at the latest research, a 1995 study by the University of Michigan, and it confirms a dramatic rise in cigarette consumption by youths since the 1980s. Smoking is up as much as 30 percent in some age brackets.

Perhaps because it is more responsive to social trends and political pressure, network television programs are often tobacco-free. Some, including the medical drama series, the soaps and young-adult dramas such as "Melrose Place," even sneak anti-smoking messages into their storylines.

The big screen, however, maintains a long addiction to puffing - from the indelible image of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall cozying up over a pair of smokes to the casually pervasive cigarette use in such recent youth-oriented films as "Reality Bites," "She's the One" and "Girls Town."

On film, cigarettes have co-starred as glamorous props, tools of seduction, instruments of rebellion and entrees to adulthood. And since Hollywood's back library is now widely available on video, young people can inhale it all.

In the Roaring '20s, Hollywood helped to legitimize widespread tobacco use among females - a public taboo before then. By the 1930s, the great movie glamour queens - Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck - looked almost naked without a cigarette elegantly in hand. And who could imagine Bogie or Clark Gable or Gary Cooper without a smoke between their lips?

Movies helped link sexiness with smoking. In the 1942 tear-jerker "Now, Voyager," Paul Henreid won Bette Davis' ardor as he lit two cigarettes and passed one to her. Later, as censorship in Hollywood films lifted, smoking in films was often a capper to sex, as well as a prelude to it.

While great screen lovers smoked, so did great screen iconoclasts: James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause," Paul Newman in "Hud." The rituals of lighting up, inhaling, blowing smoke and flicking away the butt somehow helped express alienation.

These days, young characters in films are smoking when they're nervous, amorous, disaffected. And such celebs as Johnny Depp, Christian Slater and Sarah Jessica Parker are photographed smoking on their off-hours, too.

As medical evidence continues to link tobacco to lung cancer, heart disease and other serious illnesses, anti-smoking activists keep trying to get Hollywood off the weed. SmokeFree Educational Services of Manhattan purchases large ads in trade papers, urging stars to set a good example and quit puffing - on film and off. The American Lung Association also is trying to influence the entertainment industry on this issue.

But even if every actor took the pledge, would that dissuade the 3,000 young people who start smoking each day? My college student friend doesn't think so. She believes that in these confused times, economic and psychological stress has as much to do with smoking as media allure.

And it will take more than politicians at their bully pulpits, or movie actors finding something else to do with their hands, to snuff that.