Smoke, until you smoke yourself to death
Irecently watched The Pledge, a movie directed by two time Academy Award winner Sean Penn who describes his smoking habit as “job security for oncologists”. Starring three-time Academy Award Winner Jack Nicholson, hardly a scene goes by without Nicholson's character pulling on a cigarette.
Now 89, Nicholson has been a ‘pack a day’ smoker since his teens, in his later years taking on cigars in an effort to blunt a habit he’s described as ‘stupid’. In a 1995 interview Nicholson talks about his appreciation of cigars but admits to only smoking one or two a day while wondering how George Burns managed 15.
George Burns was an actor/comedian whose career began in vaudeville and later went onto radio, film and television. It’s been estimated that he smoked some 300,000 cigars across the course of his 100 years, cutting back to a mere three a day in his 90s.
Dick Van Dyke, the star of Mary Poppins (1964), gave up his three pack a day habit in the early 1990s when an x-ray revealed emphysema scarring on his lungs.
He’s now 97 and recently said “If I'd known I was going to live so long I would have taken better care of myself”.
Of all the smokers who survived their cigarette habit the gong has to go to Bessie Nolan, one of the subjects of a 2015 documentary film called Older Than Ireland.
Focused on people who were born before Ireland became a republic, Bessie was a lifelong smoker who died in 2018 aged 106.
When the film was made she was a sprightly 103 and still walked the 500 metres or so to the local shop to get her daily cigarette fix.
Tex Williams’s 1947 hit song ‘Smoke Smoke Smoke That Cigarette’ is about the nuisance value of smoking - ‘Everything's gotta stop while you have that cigarette’ and in one wry line he makes this observation - ‘I've smoked them all my life and I ain't dead yet’.
Those who have survived their smoking habit are rare individuals with a winning ticket in the genetic lottery. Then there’s the rest.
Humphrey Bogart, one of the biggest stars of the golden age of Hollywood, managed 40 cigarettes a day and it showed. His smooth good looks degraded rapidly through his 40s and by his 50s he looked ravaged. He died from esophageal cancer aged 58.
Dedicated chain smoker Walt Disney lasted until age 65 when lung cancer caught up with him and ushered him to an early grave.
The Golden Age of Hollywood was also the golden age of smoking and from the 1930s through to the 1960s between 50-60% of the population of the Western world smoked.
It is estimated that over the last
100 years smoking has resulted in the premature deaths of some one hundred million including Beatle George Harrison, rocker Tom Petty, crooner Nat King Cole and composer/conductor Leonard
Bernstein.
The subject of a Netflix biopic ‘Maestro’, Bernstein chain smoked his way through life, ruining his lungs and circulatory system in the process. That he made it to 72 is quite something.
I was born in the early 1960s and my earliest memories are redolent with cigarette smoke.
Every shop, office, restaurant, pub, sporting venue and cinema was fitted out with ashtrays and spent butts littered the streets the way stars fill the sky.
Surrounded by tobacco I was always going to smoke. I liked the taste and the nicotine rush but most of all I liked the comfort it offered.
For the socially awkward that cigarette was a bulwark against the complexities of life, besides all those cool people smoking on TV and in the movies looked so wonderfully assured and I wanted to be like that.
In the mid-1970s a kid could still walk into a dairy and buy cigarettes and whenever I had any cash, that’s where it went.
By my 40s I was managing 2 packs a week before switching to cigars. You can’t draw cigar smoke down into your lungs but this does not make it any less harmful.
However, I preferred to ignore the reality and indulge the myth of cigars being the ‘healthier option’.
The yarns addicts like to spin to make themselves feel better about themselves!
I was around 45 when good sense got the better of me and I stopped.
The cravings and the physiological dependence made for a tough couple of weeks but when it was over it was over and I never looked back.
Recently I was standing behind a smoker at the supermarket checkout. She reeked of stale smoke, it was unpleasant and reminded me that not so long ago this is how the whole world smelled - our cars, our homes, our workplaces and clothes.
In the 1960s Kiwis were the sixth biggest consumers of cigarettes in the OECD and as late as the 1980s five thousand of us were dying from smoking related disease annually. 40 years later and only 8% still cling to the habit.
With the nation on the brink of breaking the tobacco curse, recent reversals by the new Government in favour of the tobacco lobby are disappointing but it’s hard to imagine smoking making a resurgence.
These days the industry is more aligned with disease and death than cool sophistication and as for the tobacco lobby, it is a vestige of an age when we didn’t know any better and one that operates at the same ethical level as the local meth dealer.
Few tears will be shed when the doors on tobacco HQ are finally shuttered and locked forever.
OPINION: