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The former-smoker and
current Rector of the Royal College of Art in London – where he is
also Professor of Cultural History, and author of ‘Sergio Leone –
Something to do with death’, the definitive biography of the late
Italian cigar-friendly film-maker.
JL
Where did you start smoking?
CF: At boarding school,
behind the pavilion, in time-honoured fashion, at the age of
16…one’s or two’s, rather surreptitious. I think I probably made
myself quite ill, to start with. By the time I was at university, I
smoked quite a lot, as an impoverished student, of ‘No. 6’, tipped,
and then ‘Embassy’. And there was always this joke, in 1968, in the
year of student revolution, “Advice to terrorists, ‘Light up an
Embassy.’” Plus it had coupons.
JL:
Did your university have a smoking club, at that time?
CF: No. It’s completely
changed its meaning, smoking. It was sort of hip and cool and chic,
in a way, and related to lots of images in the movies. Whereas
today I think the great image of control is not smoking in the
movies…Bruce Willis shows that he’s a cool man because he doesn’t
smoke.
JL: I’ve just flicked
through the RCA’s Graduate Catalogue and noticed there’s not one
image of smoking in it. Why is that?
CF: I don’t know -
there’s no censorship. These are the designers and the artists of
5-10 years’ hence, and I suspect they think smoking images probably
won’t be a source of their living, because there probably won’t be
any tobacco advertising, and probably this and probably that. Our
students are quite canny, they go where the action is, and they
think that by the time they make their name there won’t be much
action there, I suspect. Sometimes it’s an Eco thing, when the
students deliberately do an anti-smoking thing. But I suspect they
just don’t think that smoking’s where the action is, at the moment.
JL: Perhaps
architectural students should be considering including a permanent
ashtray in their plans for the front entrances of public buildings?
CF: Yes. There was a
wonderful plant in the RCA’s industrial design department about 3-4
years ago. A very picturesque plant that was also a smoke
extractor, inside the plant. You put it beside your table at dinner
and it purified the air and extracted the smoke, and it looked just
like a normal plant. I thought that was quite clever. There was
also a student, a few years ago, who did a satirical branding thing
– they’re all very uneasy about advertising taking over the world –
and advertised a well-known brand of medical products, only as an
ashtray, cigarette holders and all the rest of it, as a kind of
satire on brands. But, um, I don’t encourage that.
JL: What influence do you
think smoking has had on popular culture?
CF: Well, there’s the
imagery associated with smoking, the package design. Some of the
great graphic designs of the 20th century were the
package designs for Lucky Strike, done by Raymond Loewy, and the
Camel pack – they’re design classics. It’s interesting. When I did
the King Tut TV series in 1992, there was a moment in it where I
talking about the impact of ancient Egypt on popular culture in the
1920s, and we wanted to have the shot looking exactly like the Camel
pack. So I was sitting on a Camel and there was a pyramid on the
left and a palm tree on the right. Or is it the other way round?
Whichever. Anyway, the idea was that I’d be sitting on this Camel
saying, ‘King Tut had this huge influence on popular culture’, and
then the camera would pull back and the shape of the image was the
size of the box, and the whole audience would say, ‘Wow! It’s the
Camel pack’, you see. Then they lost confidence, as TV people do,
and thought no, they may not get it, so, ‘Could you just light up a
Camel, while you’re saying this.’ So here was I, talking about King
Tut’s influence on popular culture and I pulled a Camel cigarette
out of my breast pocket and lit it up. By the way, at this stage
I’d given up smoking four years’ before. And my advice to you is
never act with a camel, for each time I did this the camel did
something silly, which ruined the take. Take 1, it started eating
my shoe. Take 2, it walked off, got out of frame. Take 3, it let
out an almighty fart, at which point the sound man and the cameraman
were laughing so much that it all went wrong. In fact, they spliced
them together into one of those mad ‘It’ll be all right on the
night’ type reels. So the result was to get this effect of lighting
up this Camel, I lit up 18 cigarettes, and the following morning I
got up and I had fallen – I wanted a cigarette, and I took it up
again. Postscript, in America, they don’t like presenters smoking,
and they cut the shot out. So we went back to the original one of me
sitting on a camel saying this. So I actually took up smoking again
in the service of my art, for no purpose whatsoever, because the
shot never made the finished programme. There we go. Anyway, going
back to the impact of smoking on popular art in the 20th
century. There are wonderful film stills of people smoking
cigarettes in different ways. There’s classic moments in the
movies, there’s some paintings – there’s a famous Sickert painting
of a guy in a Homburg hat, standing there looking like Edward G
Robinson with a cigarette. So there’s a kind of iconography, as
they call it in art history, of smoking. I think it’s the graphics
of the advertising and the package design. It’s the big
contribution to visual culture in the 20th century
culture from cigarettes, I think. It’s been a fantastically rich
area, it really has.
JL: Do you think the time
has come for a retrospective look at the art of tobacco?
CF: Yeah. I think it
would be quite interesting because when in the late 1970s you
weren’t allowed to have a young person smoking in the ads, you
weren’t allowed to have someone enjoying themselves, that the
advertising sort of legislated into abstract art, which is a strange
situation. So Benson & Hedges started doing all these
Magritte-style surrealist raining cigarettes on to umbrellas, or a
bird-cage which has a cigarette packet in it and a silhouette of the
bird – Magritte-type things. Silk Cut just had a piece of silk
that’s cut. And it was abstraction, in the high street. People had
been trying for 30 years to get the British public interested in
abstract art, without any success whatsoever, and suddenly, you
walked round the high street and every cigarette ad was a piece of
abstract art. And suddenly people began to understand how
abstraction worked. You don’t have to have people, you don’t have
to have a horse. All you need is a visual joke, Silk Cut, that’s
all you need, a piece of silk that’s been cut. So, yes, that would
be interesting, to look at the contribution of cigarette advertising
to the popular appreciation of Abstract Art. Discuss.
JL:
You’ve written the definitive biography of Sergio Leone…
CF: Yes, there’s probably
more detail in it, probably more than most people want to know…
JL:
Did Leone smoke?
CF: He did. He smoked
double coronas, Havana cigars, which were almost as tall as he was.
He wasn’t tall of stature, and he used to smoke these vast cigars.
I remember my first conversation with him, which was at the
Dorchester, and he lit up this vast cigar and got a pawful of cashew
nuts which he chucked into his mouth – he got a dish of cashew nuts
and emptied it into his paw, in one go, the entire dish, and whaff!
Puffing on his double corona…he was an astonishing sort-of Falstaff
figure, with a big bellow and beard…he was larger than life. He was
actually quite a timid individual underneath, I discovered,
subsequently, and part of the book is that journey of discovering
it. The double corona went with his image. It was an Orson Welles-type
image. In some of these books about the cigar you’ll find a photo
of Leone with a little disquisition about the joys of the double
corona. Latterly, he wrote articles about smoking cigars, as well.
In the 1960s, the big thing was to write about the movies from the
point of view of the director, and the director became the new
celebrity in the movies. It started off with Alfred Hitchcock,
instantly recognisable anywhere around the world. And I think Leone
sort of created a public personality for himself, that went with his
celebrity, so there was the beard, and being overweight, like a
prophet he dressed in a sort of kaftan and smoked his double
corona. So he looked the part, he looked like the old man from the
forest. This was a larger than life character that went with larger
than life movies, so I think the corona became part of his image.
JL: Clint Eastwood smoked
cigars in the Leone spaghetti westerns…
CF: Yeah. There’s a
great debate as to what kind of cigars they were. The Italians
claim that they were a cigar called Toscano, or Toscani in the
plural, which are these rather evil southern Italian cigars of very
closely packed tobacco, very dark. I had a go at them. Wow, they’re
strong stuff. If you notice in the movies, Eastwood is constantly
lighting his cheroot and it keeps going out, I think deliberately,
‘cos he didn’t want to actually smoke, he disliked smoking a lot.
But Toscani do that as well, you keep trying to get them going and
they keep going out. What people in Italy do is cut them in half
with a pair of scissors or a razor blade, and then try and draw on
them – and it works a bit better. Some people claim they were
actually American cheroots, but I like the Italian version actually.
JL:
Leone’s western characters used to strike their matches in a
dramatic way…
CF: Oh yes, absolutely,
on all sort of things. They’d be riding past a gallows where
someone was hanging, and strike the match on the hanged man’s boots,
or on your own beard, or with your teeth, or on Klaus Kinski’s hump
– he was the hunchback in For a Few Dollars More – or on the seat of
your pants – they must have wrecked their Levi’s. Yeah, that was
all part of it. And of course the cheroot was the epitome of cool,
it was part of the style, the poncho, jeans, the sheepskin jacket,
the faded blue shirt, the stubble - the spaghettis invented
designer stubble – and the cheroot. And it was part of the personal
style. And again it’s this thing of how things have changed in the
past 40 years. In the 1960s, this guy was in control, and he showed
he was in control by the way he handled a cheroot. Today, if
someone smoked as much as Eastwood does, it’s someone who’s out of
control, it’s someone who isn’t disciplined. It’s completely
changed in the public image. You just don’t get sort of
chain-cheroot smokers as the epitome of cool anymore – all the girls
run away from them, really. But that was important. And Eastwood in
fact, when they finished the first film, A Fistful of Dollars, and
talking about the second film, For a Few Dollars More, he said,
according to Leone, Leone told me that Eastwood said, “I’ll do
anything you like for the second movie. I’ll wear the same costume,
I’ll do everything, but please, no cigars.” And Leone replied,
“You’ve got to. The cigar’s playing the lead part.” And then
Eastwood admitted, ruefully, “Well, yeah, puffing on these things
put me in the right frame of mind – kind of a fog.” So later he sort
of walked through his spaghetti western roles in a dizzy fog, with a
Toscano in his mouth, and he reckoned this was the right way to
handle the proceedings.
JL: Do you think images of smoking will one day
disappear into the ether, rather like the smoke from tobacco?
CF: No. But I think it
will change its meaning. The image of the smoker will mean
something different. It’ll still be there but maybe it’ll be
historic, maybe it’ll be nostalgia. You won’t get the last moment
of Now Voyager, when Paul Henreid placed two cigarettes in his
mouth, lit them, and passed one to Bette Davis. It was unbelievably
cool, actually it was probably my second favourite movie moment.
Then he says, “Why aim for the moon when you can have the stars.”
Oh God, that’s so wonderful. Smoking in the movies won’t mean that
anymore, it won’t be romantic. It’ll be ‘addict’, ‘baddy’,
whatever.
JL: Some movie stars
looked far more interesting when they smoked, than when they didn’t.
Did smoking add to their allure?
CF: Oh yeah. Look at
Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffanys – that hugely long cigarette
holder with the cigarette, with the jewellery, with the black
gloves, with the hair piled up – it was a fantastically
sophisticated image. That image of Audrey Hepburn staring through
the windows of Tiffanys with a long cigarette holder helped me
through puberty. This is just as a wonderful, wonderful image.
They seemed very stylish, at the time. They don’t anymore, it
wouldn’t work that way now. Now it would probably be a terrorist
played by Alan Rickman, and you can tell he’s a baddie, because he
smokes. That sort of stuff.
JL:
What’s the most interesting doorway you’ve ever smoked in?
CF: It’s not really a
doorway, but I once smoked in one of the arches of the Colisseum in
Rome, in the late 1970s. It’s not like The Third Man!
JL: If there was a button, that once pressed
would stop everybody smoking, would you press it?
CF: No, I don’t think I would. It’s a matter of
free choice, really. But if I could press a button that meant that
a) no one ever got ill and b) nobody ever puffed smoke in anybody’s
face, I’d press that one. But it’s not quite the same. |
