Touch and Go Read Free

women into his roadster and off they drove. The film ends with a rear bumper sticker: BOUND FOR SALT LAKE CITY. 2
    There are a number of memorable scenes in All Quiet , yet this is the one that’s hung on to me. Lewis Milestone, the director, chose the perfect actor for that tragic cameo role, a grand comic with a mischievous mustache.
    A long-delayed confessional. Call it contrition, though it warrants no forgiveness. Lew Ayres, as a result of his role in the film (still one of the strongest of antiwar movies) was converted into a conscientious objector. He took a public stand that no doubt may have disturbed his career. World War II had begun. I was conducting a local commentary series on a Chicago radio station. There were no tapes then. I have recently searched for a copy of the script, yet somehow I’ve lost it. Fortunately. It may have been the most craven thing I’ve ever done. I’m sure the loss was Freudian.
    I was criticizing Ayres, gently, of course (making it all the worse; I should have worn the mark of T for toady as Hester wore A for adultery). I was righteously addressing Ayres, in sorrow, of course (this sounds worse and worse as I type it) for his hurting the efforts
to recruit soldier boys. I am fairly certain he never heard it. Mine was a limited local audience.
    I had the effrontery to call him years later while I was working on the oral history “ The Good War. ” I had intended to apologize and ask if he’d appear in the book as a conscientious objector. I had no chance to tell him my dirty little secret (he fortunately never found out). He was remarkably gracious, though by this time weary of the subject and planning a memoir of his own. I don’t think he ever got around to it.
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    AS NATACHA, oh so gently, touched my cheek—eighty-six years later, I’d say “sensually”—Sam lit his Turkish cigarette. Murad was his favorite brand. I’ve always wondered why Russian Jewish tailors preferred Turkish tobacco to all others. It was, I suspect, more expensive than, say, Camels, for which, said the billboard, you’d walk a mile. I remember the popularity as well as the aroma of Helmar and Melachrinos among his collegial craftsmen.
    As a prelude to his lighting up, he invariably tapped the elegantly long cigarette against the hard Murad case. He was at the moment Noël Coward; but once he lit up and blew smoke rings in the air, the cigarette poised between thumb and index finger, he was transformed into Uncle Vanya. He offered Natacha one, of course. Her smoke rings matched his. They needed no Chesterfield ad to tell them what to do.
    The most popular billboard of them all was the Chesterfield ad: a pretty girl—was she a John Held Jr. lovely?—invited the unseen other to “Blow some my way.” As the smoke wafted in, hers was a more satisfied smile. No Mona Lisa, that one. I don’t recall whether she had as yet removed her earrings.
    Of all the works of billboard artistry, the ones that still impress me most were devoted to the delightfulness of cigarettes. From time to time, there were the scolds and Cassandras whom the tobacco industry had to deal with. The Lucky Strikers and the others
did not have as rough a time as they do now, but there were troublemakers.
    During the resurgence of the suffragist movement, early in the century (the twentieth), the tobacco companies discovered an astonishing spokesman who was master of his craft. I had the enthralling experience of meeting Edward Bernays a number of times. Always there was the professorial air: the graying well-trimmed mustache; the spectacles; the easy, witty conversation. He was a pioneer, in fact; a revolutionary in his field. He had a reputation as a free thinker on the liberal side. But a job is a job is a job. He was the master of his. It was he and his way with words who transmuted “press agent” into “public relations counselor.”
    When we