The Good Cigar

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Have a Cigar

This invitation is surely one of the happiest phrases in the language.

Chances are your father celebrated your birth by handing out cigars. NASA mission controllers invariably light up to mark the success of a space venture. When astronaut John Glenn came back from piloting America's historic first orbital Mercury flight he was given the equivalent of his weight in Havana cigars. Notified of the rescue of a U.S. Air Force pilot who had been shot down in Bosnia, President Clinton broke a rule banning smoking inside the White House and lit a cigar. Great Britain's wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, held his cigar in the crook of fingers raised in a V as both an instrument of defiance and an expression of confidence that he soon would smoke it in salute to triumph. Following one devastating air raid on London during the Nazi blitz, he immediately telephoned the tobacco shop where he bought and stored his Havanas. "Don't be concerned, sir," the proprietor assured him. "Your cigars are safe!" So was Britain.

As a remembrance of their meeting in Spain, Ernest Hemingway presented Ava Gardner with the band of his cigar. This romantic encounter took place following the bullfights, where victorious matadors were saluted with cries of "Ol!" and cigars all around.

A cigar became the indelible trademark of New York City's Mayor Fiorello La Guardia as he dashed to fires, smashed slot machines, and read comic strips to children on the radio during a newspaper strike. The tilt of a rakish cigar was as much the hallmark of Groucho Marx's comedy as were his low-slung walk, leer, and painted-on mustache. W.C. Fields brandished hisomnipresent and half-smoked stogie as if it were a sword unsheathed against an enemy, whether it be the sheriff who had come to run him out of town, a nagging wife, or a nettlesome infant. "I haven't been sick a day since I was a child," said Fields. "A steady diet of cigars and whiskey cured me."

Like nothing else man-made, it is the virtue of the cigar that smoking one can be a powerful symbol, whether personal, social, political, or economic.

"Like all great art," wrote Thomas Simmons in the New York Times, "a cigar is iconoclastic. It wrecks all notions of civility and good behavior. A cigar announces revolution. At the same time it suggests the mystery of connoisseurship. Like all good mysteries, this one may arouse longing and even the envy the uninitiated feel toward the keepers of a strange, startling rite."

"By the cigars they smoke," said author John Galsworthy, "ye shall know the texture of men's souls."

Acceptance of cigar smoking has had its ups and downs since Galsworthy wrote those words.

Today, despite inroads made by the antismoking movement, cigars are suddenly fashionable. The "best of people" smoke, not sheepishly in the privacy of their homes, offices, and limousines, but proudly and in public. In addition to having a slick new magazine, CIGAR Aficionado, which first appeared in September 1992, available four times a year, cigarists seeking literary support can find it a dozen times annually in the pages of The Cigar Monthly, launched in 1993, and, since 1995, in the form of Smoke Magazine. This spritely periodical was the brainchild of Aaron L. Sigmund, and is published by a family that has been publishing on the subject of cigars since 1886 when Henry Lockwood introduced cigar retailers in New York to Tobacco. It was followed by Smokeshop, distributed to tobacco retailers in North America.

Yet long before these publications extolled the role of the cigar in the masculine world, a cigar maker and prophet of the sacred rite of smoking, Zino Davidoff, asked in The Connoisseur's Book of the Cigar, "What is there in a cigar that intensifies and prolongs the pleasure of smoking, which so attracts men? What is the noble quality the cigar brings to tobacco? How can one say that the cigar--nothing but an object--has a soul?"

The poet Lord Byron harbored no doubts. "Sublime Tobacco," he wrote. "Give me a cigar!"

Mark Twain smoked more than a score of cigars in a day and vowed that if cigar smoking were not allowed in Heaven he would gladly go to the other place.

In his memoir, Summing Up, Somerset Maugham confesses, "At the time when I was young and very poor, I only smoked cigars which were offered to me. I promised myself that if I ever had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and after dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought dissolution."

In The Gold Rush Charlie Chaplin presents one of the most heart-tugging final scenes in the history of motion pictures as his "little tramp" retrieves the discarded and chewed stub of a millionaire's cigar and waddles away with it, puffing as happily as if he, too, were a rich man.

But cigar smoking is not just for the wealthy. Neither of the authors of this book is rich, although Kevin Gordon's introduction to cigar smoking was with a decidedly upscale Havana. In a positively Hemingwayesque moment he enjoyed his initial cigar (a Montecristo No. 3) in the Plaza de Toros in Madrid in 1982. As an aficionado and a novice matador he had actually ventured into the bullring twice and gotten himself fitted for a royal blue suit of lights. When not in Spain to run with the bulls in Pamplona or attending bullfights he celebrates unveilings of the portraits he paints for a living by lighting one of his favorite hand-rolled Havanas. Like many connoisseurs of Cuban tobacco, he longs for the day when travel to that island is permitted so he can obtain them legally.

Until then he generously shares with me the ones he manages to obtain while we engage in another mutual passion--or is it an obsession?--the pursuit of all there is to know about Sherlock Holmes in all his manifestations, from the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the television incarnation by the late Jeremy Brett. Although the mention of the Sleuth of Baker Street in a book about cigars may seem out of place, it is not. While the image of Sherlock is of a lean and hawkish figure enshrouded in a cloud of smoke as he puffs his way toward the solution of "a three pipe problem," Holmes is not only a cigar smoker but also an expert on them, their origins and makers, their tobaccos and their ashes. Cigars figure in several of his cases and lead to the solution of the mystery. In The Sign of the Four, the author of a monograph entitled "Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos" explains to his associate and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson: "To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of the bird's-eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato."

In The Boscombe Valley Mystery Holmes deduces from a crime scene that includes the stump of a discarded cigar that the murderer is "a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-soled shooting-boots and a grey cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a cigar-holder, and carries a blunt penknife in his pocket." This last fact is discerned from the ragged manner in which the tip of the cigar has been cut; the absence of teeth marks make obvious the presence of the holder.

I employed no such amenity for my first venture into the world of cigars, on a dare when I was a college freshman in the 1950s in Philadelphia. My first was from a package of five-for-a-half-a-buck, machine-made, drugstore-bought Phillies. By the time I launched a career in broadcast journalism, I had graduated a bit upmarket to smoke Grenadiers. Although these six-in-a-pack-for-a-dollar cigars were hardly of the quality of the Havanas favored by sportscaster Howard Cosell after a steak at Manhattan's posh "21" restaurant, that did not dissuade him from bumming a Grenadier from me whenever our paths crossed in the 1960s at ABC News. But working in a newsroom never afforded one the atmosphere conducive to discovering whether cigars, indeed, have a soul.

For a period, cigars developed a bad reputation. The smoke-filled back room of shady politics, the cigar-chomping gangster, Clint Eastwood's ruthless gunman all cast cigars in an unflattering light.

Little wonder that the cigar's reputation suffered. Happily, though, this form of tobacco use has rebounded from its negative reputation to such an extent that the cigar is now a symbol of success in almost every aspect of American life as we near the end of the twentieth century. Cigar clubs and "cigar-friendly" restaurants have blossomed. Makers following the old tradition of the wine industry book the grand ballrooms of deluxe hotels for cigar "tastings." There's even a hit motion picture (Smoke) that seems destined to become a cult classic. A thoroughbred racehorse named Cigar thundered down the homestretches of the country's finest tracks. Celebrities and successful men and even a few women today boast of their affection for cigars.

Although some angry males may have turned to the cigar for its iconoclastic impact, most have discovered--as smokers have done through the centuries--that there is more to smoking a cigar than anyone who has never smoked one could ever appreciate.

In The Good Cigar you will find all aspects of the world of the cigar. From the most expensive to the least costly we offer everything there is to know about smoking them, whether you are already a connoisseur or still just a beginner. From the "discovery" of tobacco by European explorers to the process of making them; the history of cigar smoking in America; the cigar in literature and art; the romantic allure of the cigar store; the story behind the cigar store Indian, cigar bands, and boxes and those who smoked and smoke cigars--along with evaluations of brands and prices--we offer not only the "how-to" of cigars but also the why.