Movie Quote of the Day (‘Horse Feathers,’ With Groucho in a Unique College Football Moment)

Referee [sees Wagstaff lying in the middle of the field with a cigar]: “What are you doing with that cigar in your mouth?”

Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff [played by Groucho Marx)]: “Why? Do you know another way to smoke it?”—Horse Feathers (1932), written by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone, and Arthur Skeekman (uncredited)

Wouldn’t you find the football game in Horse Feathers a lot more unexpected and entertaining than any of the bowl games you’ll watch on TV today?

TV Quote of the Day (‘Seinfeld,’ on a Smoking Side Effect)

[Kramer barges into Jackie Chiles’ law office.]

Kramer [played by Michael Richards]: “Jackie, we gotta talk.”

Jackie Chiles [played by Phil Morris]: [pushing him out the door] “No way, Kramer. You've brought nothing but a mountain of misfortune and humiliation. Now get out.”

Kramer: “But Jackie—"

Jackie: “I said out.”

Kramer: “Jackie, I think I got a case against the tobacco companies.”

Jackie [stopping short]: “The who?”

Kramer: “The tobacco companies.”

Jackie [smiling, thinking of the possibilities]: “I've been wanting a piece of them for years….Did that cigarette warning label mention anything about damage to your appearance?”

Kramer: “No, it didn't say anything.”

Jackie: “So you're a victim. Now your face is shallow, unattractive, disgusting.”

Kramer: “So Jackie, do you think we got a case?”

Jackie [positively beaming]: “Your face is my case.”—Seinfeld, Season 8, Episode 9, “The Abstinence,” original air date Nov. 21, 1996, teleplay by Steve Koren, directed by Andy Ackerman

TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A*S*H,’ As Potter and Radar Consider Cigars)

Col. Sherman Potter [played by Harry Morgan]: “Cigar?” 

Cpl. Walter “Radar” O'Reilly [played by Gary Burghoff]: “Will it stunt my growth?”

Col. Potter [eyeing the short Radar]: “What do you got to lose?”

Radar: “Is it habit forming?”

Col. Potter: “Nah. I've been smoking five cigars a day for 45 years. Never got the habit.”— M*A*S*H, Season 6, Episode 1, “Fade Out, Fade In,” original air date Sept. 20, 1977, teleplay by James Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, directed by Hy Averback

Talking about tongues planted firmly in cheek! Just as M*A*S*H used the distant mirror of the Korean conflict to comment on the Vietnam War, its writers realized that their audience would know that, 13 years before, the Surgeon General’s report had warned that smoking causes lung cancer and probably heart disease.

Quote of the Day (David Sedaris, on a Past January Train Ride)

“[T]here was a smoking car on the Amtrak I took from Raleigh to Chicago in 1984, but seven years later it was gone. By then if you wanted a cigarette your only option was to head for the bar. It sounds all right in passing, romantic even—'the bar on the Lake Shore Limited’—but in fact it was rather depressing. Too bright, too loud, and full of alcoholics who commandeered the seats immediately after boarding and remained there, marinating like cheap kebabs, until they reached their destinations. At first, their voices might strike you as jolly: the warm tones of strangers becoming friends. Then the drinkers would get sloppy and repetitive, settling, finally, on that cross-eyed mush that passes for alcoholic sincerity.” —Comic essayist David Sedaris, on a January 1991 train ride, in “Reflections:Guy Walks into a Bar,” The New Yorker, Apr. 20, 2009

Quote of the Day (William Talman, in a Landmark Anti-Smoking Ad)

“Before I die I want to do what I can to leave a world free of cancer for my six children.”—Actor William Talman, in a commercial for the American Cancer Society, broadcast a month after his death from lung cancer, quoted in “Legacy,” New Castle News, September 14, 1968

Most viewers of old-time TV know William Talman, born in Detroit on this date a century ago, as District Attorney Hamilton Burger, perennial loser to defense attorney Perry Mason. So did I, when I started watching the classic TV noir based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s classic novels as a child back in the late Sixties. That made it all the more stunning when I first saw this one-minute public service commercial.

Nowadays, it’s commonplace for anti-smoking ads featuring real people, in all their excruciating pain, to air. It was not so at the tail-end of the Mad Men era. You can imagine, then, the extraordinary impact of an actor on one of the most popular TV dramas for nine seasons, not only saying he was dying but announcing his killer: the cigarette habit he had picked up at age 12.

The actor had been able to give up heavy drinking after his third marriage, but not the three packs of cigarettes a day he had reached. In 1967, a year after the end of his show’s run, Talman learned that inoperable lung cancer meant his life would be running out, too.

A November 2001 Boston Globe article by Columbia University historian Barron H. Lerner (reprinted on the History News Network Website) discussed the compelling circumstances behind the commercial’s making: how the actor approached the American Cancer Society with the idea for the ad; then, how Talman, gaunt and frequently foggy from morphine to dull his pain, summoned his strength long enough to warn the public from repeating his mistake (“I’ve got lung cancer. So take some advice about smoking and losing from someone who’s been doing both for years: If you don’t smoke, don’t start. If you do smoke, quit. Don’t be a loser.”).

It says something about the initial seductiveness of cigarettes—then, its tight grip on human biochemistry—that the actor’s family, try as it might after witnessing his final agony, could not take his advice. His son Tim took up the habit before finally quitting. Wife Peggy was more tragic. After quitting at her husband’s urging—and even after speaking out on behalf of the American Cancer Society in the early 1970s—she began smoking again. Thirty years later, she, too, was found to have inoperable lung cancer.

Quote of the Day (Melissa Leo, on Why So Many Actors Smoke)

“It’s a friendship thing, a companionship thing. An actor’s life is fairly lonely. There might well be more working female actors who live single lives, and that exacerbates the loneliness of being an actor. For me, a lot of it is the companionship of your little friends in a box. It’s reliable.”—Oscar-winning actress Melissa Leo, on why “a surprising amount of actors smoke,” especially actresses, quoted in Andrew Goldman, “The Truth Will Get You Fired: Melissa Leo on Self-Promotion, Imaginary Boyfriends and How to Lose a Job,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, September 16, 2012

(Photo of Melissa Leo, April 2009, at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Woody Allen's film Whatever Works, taken by David Shankbone.)

Quote of the Day (Simon Gray, on the “Benefits” of Aging)

“So here I am, two hours into my sixty-sixth year. From now on I’m entitled to certain benefits, or so I gather — a state pension of so many pounds a week, free travel on public transport, reduced fee on the railways. I assume I’m also entitled to subsidiary benefits — respectful attention when I speak, unfailing assistance when I stumble or lurch, an absence of registration when I do the things I’ve been doing more and more frequently lately, but have struggled to keep under wraps — belching, farting, dribbling, wheezing. I can do all these things publicly now, in a spirit of mutual acceptance.”—Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries

(I’ve been interested in playwright Gray for more than a quarter century, when I wrote an article on him for a reference publication. It came as a surprise over the weekend, then, when I learned that Gray had passed away in early August. Nothing I learned from writing that piece prepared me for the details of his life as revealed in the New York Times obit: smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish—not just whiskey, but if, his claim was to be believed, up to four bottles of champagne a day.

The drinking habit fell by the wayside after his doctor told Gray he’d be dead in no time if he didn’t give it up. But, as The Smoking Diaries demonstrated, there was a limit to what he would accept. Many readers would find the unmistakable voice in the passage above—unapologetically cantankerous, a jaundiced view of both the modern welfare state and the joys of aging—hilarious. His obstinate refusal to forsake smoking simply angers me, however. Believe me, I know how hard it can be to give up a vice, but I’ve felt considerable guilt in the process and have struggled as far as I’ve been able, sometimes even succeeding. It’s Gray’s lack of remorse that I find aggravating.

Too bad. Gray’s death from cancer short-circuited a highly productive career in the theater, and someone who wrote with considerable into the chattering class of British intellectuals in plays such as Butley, Otherwise Engaged, Quartermaine’s Terms and The Common Pursuit. Part of my annoyance, I realize now, stems from the thought that if he’d taken even a bit better care of himself, we might have had even more work that enriched the theater and the larger culture of our time. Eternal peace to your curmudgeonly shade, Mr. Gray.)