Thank You for Smoking

When Nick returns to his office, he finds that Jeannette, who technically works for Nick but has a long relationship with his boss, BR, has left a pile of studies on his desk. Gazelle, Nick’s assistant, says that BR wants to see him immediately. First, Nick calls a reporter who wants Nick’s response to a new scientific report that blames smoking for Buerger’s Disease, a circulatory condition. When he finishes the call, Gazelle reminds Nick he must see BR immediately.

BR, a former cigarette vending machine executive, replaced JJ Hollister, Nick’s previous and more serene boss. BR successfully made several important gains for the tobacco industry. He also works to extend the sale of US cigarettes in Asian nations. BR asks Nick if the Academy is getting its money’s worth out of Nick. BR says, “You’re spending your whole time stamping out wastebasket fires when you ought to be out there setting forest fires” (17). BR instructs Nick to come up with a radical new plan to expand tobacco sales by Monday, which is in three days.

For lunch, Nick goes to Bert’s restaurant, where he meets with Bobby Jay Bliss and Polly Bailey, the two other members of the Mod Squad. The “Mod” in Mod Squad is an acronym for “merchants of death.” The three are the chief spokespersons for the firearms, alcohol, and tobacco industries and meet weekly to brainstorm their current challenges. Bobby Jay works for SAFETY, a gun rights group. Bobby Jay is a veteran who lost his left hand in a helicopter accident in Vietnam. In addition to being a gun rights spokesperson, Bobby Jay is a born-again Christian. The other member of the Mod Squad is Polly Bailey, an attractive young woman who works for the Moderation Council, a group that advocates on behalf of the liquor industry. Polly is going through a divorce from her husband, Hector, who is an anti-overpopulation activist and is seldom in the United States.

As they sit around the lunch table, each describes the crisis they are dealing with at the moment. For Bobby Jay, a postal worker has attacked other employees with an assault weapon. Polly has good news: The Michigan Supreme Court has ruled that sobriety roadblocks are unconstitutional. Nick says that he is scheduled to debate Gordon Craighead from the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention of the Department of Health and Human Services. Craighead’s office spends $300 million a year on anti-smoking, anti-drunk driving groups. Nick notes that the tobacco industry spends $2.5 billion a year, or $4,000 per second, promoting smoking, but “Nick nonetheless rail[s] against OSAP’s ‘runaway budgets’” (30).

Bobby Jay receives a phone call telling him that the postal worker who attacked their coworkers was a sustaining life member of SAFETY, the Society for the Advancement of Firearms and Effective Training of Youth. He quickly leaves the meeting to do damage control.

After lunch, Nick learns he must appear on Oprah. The surgeon general wants a complete ban on cigarette advertising, and host Oprah Winfrey has planned a show on smoking. When BR finds out and wants to send Jeannette, Nick explains that the industry’s most important spokesperson should be on this panel.

Nick is late picking up his 12-year-old son, Joey. The school’s headmaster, Reverand Griggs, waits with Joey and asks Nick to meet with him next Friday. Nick and Joey get pizza and a video, The Sands of Iwo Jima, in which John Wayne is shot while reaching for a cigarette. This is Joey’s weekend to stay with his dad.

At 6:30 on Monday morning, Nick presents the idea to BR that they should work with Hollywood to reintroduce cigarettes into motion pictures in a positive way. He relates that cigarettes boomed after WWI, when General Pershing ordered “thousands of tons” of cigarettes sent to the frontlines (39), when women began to smoke as a diet aid, and when films let actors smoke on screen. BR seems unimpressed and tells Nick he’s going to fire him after he gets back from appearing on Oprah. BR asks Nick to show Jeannette where everything is when he returns.

Nick flies to Chicago and jogs prior to going to Oprah’s studio. Among the other guests is Ron Goode from the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention at the Department of Health and Human Services, along with two other anti-smoking organizations’ representatives and a teenager named Robin Williger, who is fighting lung cancer. Oprah places Nick next to Robin. Nick knows he has been played and that there is no way out of this confrontation. When the show begins, he asks if he can smoke, stunning everyone. He says, “[I]t’s traditional at firing squads to offer the condemned a last cigarette” (47). Other panelists chastise him, but Robin laughs. When Goode criticizes the joke, Nick attacks him, claiming that Goode wants Robin to die so he can increase the funding of his agency. Goode becomes so angry he must be restrained, while Nick sits back and wears a serene look for the rest of the show, saying at the very end that the tobacco industry has started a $5 million effort to stop underage smoking.

As Nick rides to the airport, his cellphone continuously rings. When he finally answers, an enraged BR chastises him because Nick announced a $5 million, rather than $500,000, underage anti-smoking campaign. A phone call from the “Captain,” a tobacco tycoon, interrupts BR. The Captain wants Nick to fly to Winston-Salem to meet with him.

Once in his Winston-Salem hotel, Nick receives a phone call from the Captain, who asks him to come to the Tobacco Club for lunch. The club is an opulent Greek Revival structure built by tobacco barons in the 1890s. At the arrival of the Captain, a genteel-looking man in his late sixties with a cane, everyone treats him with great discretion. He has mint juleps with Nick before a sumptuous meal. The Captain lectures Nick about those throughout history who opposed smoking, implying that this is a centuries-long battle that grew particularly heated after the connection between health concerns and tobacco came to light.

The Captain tells Nick he had to undergo heart surgery in California, before which the young surgeon told him that the operating room was referred to as Marlboro Country. The Captain tells Nick how proud he is of Nick’s work on Oprah. He is grateful to have a young smoker like Nick who is willing to carry the tobacco torch forward. He knows about Nick’s time as a TV reporter, in which he erroneously reported that the president had choked to death, causing the stock market to drop. The Captain says Nick emerged from that an angry young man who has tried to prove himself ever since. The Captain mentions that BR has an idea that cigarettes should be placed in motion pictures again. While BR wants Jeannette to be the one to go to Hollywood, the Captain insists that Nick is his man. At the end of their meeting, the Captain delivers Nick to the airport, where the Captain’s private Gulfstream 5 jet waits for Nick’s flight to Washington.

Back in his office, BR presents Nick with a raise from $105,000 to $200,000 a year. Nick can tell that BR is not happy about the development. He tells BR that the Captain likes BR’s ideas about reinserting cigarettes into movies, though BR says the Captain misunderstood whose idea it was. Other employees at the Academy congratulate Nick on the turn of events that spared his job and made him the Captain’s new favorite employee.

Gazelle has many messages for Nick, including death threats, an invitation to Larry King Live, and a request for an interview from newspaper reporter Heather Holloway. Nick calls Sven Gland, his ad agent in Minneapolis. He offers Sven the $5 million campaign to prevent underage smoking, with the caveat that the campaign can have no impact whatsoever on young people. Nick books himself for the next day’s Larry King show.

At lunch with the Mod Squad, everyone reports having had a relatively good day. Polly says the Pope has approved the drinking of sacramental wine in moderation. Bobby Jay tells Nick what he knows about Heather, who is an attractive young woman. After Bobby Jay leaves, Nick, who finds Polly very attractive, asks her to go for a drink with him that evening. She turns him down.

As Nick prepares to go on Larry King, he discovers that the guest appearing after him is Lorne Lutch, the Tumbleweed Man, a cowboy whose face represented Tumbleweed cigarettes on billboards and in magazines for decades. Now dying of lung cancer, Lorne speaks out against cigarettes. Ironically, Nick was the person who persuaded the Academy not to sue Lorne for breach of contract.

When the show begins, Nick fields several questions and comments from hostile viewers. One person at the Centers for Disease Control takes exception to Nick’s comment that 96% of heavy smokers never develop serious illnesses. Nick criticizes him back, saying that because of smoking restrictions, many smokers are catching pneumonia because they have to go outside to smoke. Another caller asks if anyone ever threatened to kill a guest on Larry King’s show. When Larry says no, the caller says that, within one week, Nick is going to be killed.

As Nick drives to the office, Gazelle calls to say that the nicotine patch companies are threatening to sue because Nick said on Larry King that they should not be trusted. He thinks, “The achievement of car phones is that your morning can now be ruined even before you get to the office” (81). He discovers that the Captain has assigned him a security detail. Though he thinks this is an overreaction, he must accept the constant presence of the three-man detail.

He goes to the Il Peccatore restaurant to meet with Heather Holloway. The restaurant is famous because people once caught Senator Finisterre with a young woman in the backroom. Nick finds Heather very attractive. She knows a great deal about him and wants to interview him for her series on New Puritanism. After a stumbling start to the conversation, he becomes much more in tune with the questions she is asking, which she finds very stimulating. She reads comments about him in which people compare him to a pimp, profiteer, and mass murderer. He explains his terrible gaffe of announcing that the president choked to death and then modestly explains he is mostly interested in paying his mortgage. When she asks about the $5 million anti-smoking fund, Nick expounds on how sensitive the tobacco industry is to underage smoking. After more back and forth, she asks if he is married, to which he replies that he is divorced. She says she would like to have an in-depth interview with him, and he asks for the check.