Smoke Got in Their Eyes

By BOB GREENE
NYT

FRANK SINATRA, exuding crisp sophistication, a squared pocket handkerchief peeking out of his suit jacket, a fedora tilted back from his forehead, eased into the opening words of “I Get a Kick Out of You.” Behind him, in this 1950s black-and-white television appearance, was a giant blowup of what looks like an album cover, with the title “Music for Smokers Only.”

And Sinatra was smoking, all right, even as he sang. He took deep puffs between phrases; inhaling, exhaling a thick plume of smoke, then: “I get no kick from Champagne ... .” He held the cigarette between his first and second fingers throughout the song, sometimes flicking the ash as percussive punctuation; at moments, he was absolutely encased in white smoke. Once he had to briefly turn his head to clear his throat, but then, cigarette aloft, he sang on.

This presentation, included in a new boxed DVD set of vintage Sinatra performances, must have been an unremarkable sight half a century ago: America’s most revered singer, a man who set the tone for how other men wanted to behave, puffing away on national TV even as he worked at his craft. It was a reflection of what life in the United States looked like, what the culture expected.

What might the Sinatra of the 1950s — and the men and women who watched and listened to him — have made of the pictures that federal regulators now plan to require on every cigarette pack sold in the United States, beginning in 2012? The images, meant to cover fully half the pack’s surface area, are purposely grim and gruesome: smoke billowing from a tracheotomy hole in a man’s neck; a woman blowing smoke in an infant’s face; a toe tag attached to a corpse; a colorful rendering of a diseased lung; a cancerous lip; a man stricken with an apparent heart attack; another man in a coffin; tombstones in a cemetery.

(More here.)

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