cigarette lighter 9781501307362, 9781501307393, 9781501307386

Citation preview

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The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary—even banal—objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you’ve read a few of these, you’ll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: ‘I wonder what the story is behind this thing?’ Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From and How We Got to Now  In 1957 the French critic and semiotician Roland Barthes published Mythologies, a groundbreaking series of essays in which he analysed the popular culture of his day, from laundry detergent to the face of Greta Garbo, professional wrestling to the Citroën DS. This series of short books, Object Lessons, continues the tradition. Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

PRAISE FOR HOTEL BY JOANNA WALSH:

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A slim, sharp meditation on hotels and desire. ... Walsh invokes everyone from Freud to Forster to Mae West to the Marx Brothers. She’s funny throughout, even as she documents the dissolution of her marriage and the peculiar brand of alienation on offer in lavish places. Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review

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Evocative ... Walsh’s strange, probing book is all the more affecting for eschewing easy resolution. Publishers Weekly Walsh’s writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery ... Hotel is a boldly intellectual work that repays careful reading. Its semiotic wordplay, circling prose and experimental form may prove a refined taste, but in its deft delineation of a complex modern phenomenon— and, perhaps, a modern malaise—it’s a great success. Melissa Harrison, Financial Times Walsh has been praised to the skies by Chris Kraus and Jeff Vandermeer, and it isn’t hard to see why. Her writing sways between the tense and the absurd, as if it’s hovering between this world and another. Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire

PRAISE FOR DRONE BY ADAM ROTHSTEIN:

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Adam Rothstein’s primer on drones covers (such themes as) the representation of drones in science fiction and popular culture. The technological aspects are covered in detail, and there is interesting discussion of the way in which our understanding of technology is grounded in historical narratives. As Rothstein writes, the attempt to draw a boundary between one technology and another often ignores the fact that new technologies are not quite as new as we think. Christopher Coker, Times Literary Supplement

A book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Series Editors: Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg

Advisory Board: Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Johanna Drucker, Raiford Guins, Graham Harman, renée hoogland, Pam Houston, Eileen Joy, Douglas Kahn, Daniel Miller, Esther Milne, Timothy Morton, Kathleen Stewart, Nigel Thrift, Rob Walker, Michele White.

In association with  

Books in the series Remote Control by Caetlin Benson-Allott Golf Ball by Harry Brown Driver’s License by Meredith Castile Drone by Adam Rothstein Silence by John Biguenet Glass by John Garrison Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly Refrigerator by Jonathan Rees Waste by Brian Thill Hotel by Joanna Walsh Hood by Alison Kinney Dust by Michael Marder Shipping Container by Craig Martin Cigarette Lighter by Jack Pendarvis Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne Tree by Matthew Battles (forthcoming) Questionnaire by Evan Kindley (forthcoming) Password by Martin Paul Eve (forthcoming) Bread by Scott Cutler Shershow (forthcoming) Hair by Scott Lowe (forthcoming) Blanket by Kara Thompson (forthcoming) Doorknob by Thomas Mical (forthcoming)

cigarette lighter JACK PENDARVIS

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Jack Pendarvis, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pendarvis, Jack, 1963Cigarette lighter / Jack Pendarvis. pages cm. – (Object lessons) Summary: “An eclectic and poetic exploration of the cigarette lighter and its association with romance, magic, art, science, immortality and death in literature and popular culture”– Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-5013-0736-2 (paperback) 1. Cigar lighters–Social aspects–United States. 2. Smoking–Social aspects– United States. 3. Popular culture–United States. I. Title. TS2280.P46 2016 688’.4–dc23 2015018448

ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-0736-2 ePub: 978-1-5013-0737-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0738-6 Series: Object Lessons Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

This book is dedicated to Ted Ballard and Roy Blount Jr.

Ten thousand people may never forget Cezanne’s apple, but a billion viewers will remember the lighter from Strangers on a Train. —Godard, Histoire(s) du Cinema

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Contents

1 Welcome to the ­National Lighter ­Museum  1 2 Personalized  13 3 The disposability of the permanent; the permanence of the disposable  23 4  Masters of fire  45 5  Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em  61 6  What have we learned so far?  67 7  Strike anywhere  69 8  In cars  83

9  Strange intimacy  91 10  About these little things  99 Acknowledgments  101 Bibliography  103 Filmography  111 Index  119

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Contents

1  Welcome to the ­National Lighter ­Museum

I had known him less than half an hour when Ted Ballard showed me a tobacco pouch made from a human scrotum. “Now, this could be from an ape or something but I doubt it,” he said. I had to admit it looked familiar. A widow brought him the scrotum, which her husband had confiscated from the belongings of a Japanese prisoner of war, one of the late holdouts in the Philippines. “People know that you’re collecting this stuff and you have no control over what direction your collection is going to go,” Mr.  Ballard said. “When somebody would pass away, their family would pick up all their smoking paraphernalia and bring it to me. I’ve got a guy right now from the Pentagon, he emails me every other month wanting to donate a thousand ship’s lighters.” Mr. Ballard doesn’t need a thousand ship’s lighters. A fraction of what he already has would make an entire

collection for a lesser soul. “I’ve got ’em that was carried on the Apollo 13,” he said. “You can collect just what the astronauts carried. If you notice those bulgy pockets when they get on those things, they’re full of lighters, I guarantee you.” Mr. Ballard hung the scrotum on the stem of its bamboo opium pipe and stashed it among a jumble of other accessories. I had traveled from Oxford, Mississippi, to Guthrie, Oklahoma, to visit the National Lighter Museum, or what used to be the National Lighter Museum. “The City of Guthrie seen fit to shut us down,” Mr. Ballard had explained to me on the phone. In the same breath he said, “We never turn away a visitor.” He was eighty-two when I met him, and collecting lighters since the age of seven. His museum had already been off the grid for fourteen years, largely because of his suspicion of bureaucracy. “I’m not a 501,” he said. “I learned a long time ago with my whiskey-making family, you don’t trust revenuers. If you’re a 501(c)(3), you can’t sell it. It becomes . . . you have to . . . you have to appoint who you want it to go to. You have to write down who you want to have it.” He’s afraid that when he dies his collection might be split up on eBay, easily dispersing his lifetime of work. Mr. Ballard did it the hard way, not like the eBay scavengers he seems to consider greedy and soft. He estimates the combined value of his 30,000 pieces at one million dollars but 2

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said he’d take half that from someone who promised to keep the collection intact, and surprised me by offering a cut of $100,000 if I could find a buyer. I told him I didn’t know too many people with half a million dollars. He’s had some offers. One group I won’t name here jerked him around: “And them motherfuckers, you don’t believe a word they say. They’ll fuck you if they get a chance. I hate them sons of bitches with a purple passion.” But he has also come tantalizingly close to selling a few times. “I don’t know if you’re familiar, if you know who Halliburton is,” he said. “Well, Halliburton, they came up about seven or eight different times wanting to buy the museum to move it to Duncan down here where their headquarters is. Well, what happened is, they had meetings after meetings and they decided that I was the museum, the collector was the museum. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to go down there. They said, ‘Hey the price is fantastic, but we have to have you.’ Something about the provenance and all this bullshit. Right now I still have my memory. I know where every lighter comes from. But.” As we walked the few short steps from his house and approached the large metal outbuilding where his collection was stored, a mechanized voice, stern but affable, rang from a hidden loudspeaker: “YOU ARE TRESPASSING . . . YOU ARE TRESPASSING . . . YOU ARE TRESPASSING.” It reminded me of when I first discovered Mr. Ballard’s website. Every time I returned to the homepage there was the click of a tape recorder and some background buzzing before Welcome to the N ­ ational Lighter ­Museum

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a similar voice said, “WELCOME . . . TO THE NATIONAL LIGHTER MUSEUM.” The website looked perilously close to obsolete. Over some plain wallpaper stamped thoroughly with a pale gray watermark, two crudely animated flip-top lighters framed the headline banner. Below that, four identical American flags rippled digitally: a lot of blank space; an uninspiring grid of links. I called the given phone number just to see if the museum still existed. I had done this kind of thing before. I once found an old self-published paperback by a Wisconsin spiritualist society, Extracts from 44 Recorded Tapes of the channeled spirits of Bessie Smith, Chopin, Thomas Jefferson, Lionel Barrymore, and someone called Bimbo the Clown. There was a phone number printed on the front. I called it out of curiosity. The phone rang a long time. It rang longer than phones ever ring anymore. Then she picked up. It was the woman who had prepared the extracts, according to the book’s cover, a very old woman now. I think I disturbed her nap. I apologized and lied that I had the wrong number. She said, “I just sit here and watch the world go by.” Mr. Ballard’s phone manner, by way of contrast, was lively and keen. He said I could come by anytime, but to make sure to call a day in advance because “We’re seniors and we go on cruises. Sometimes our sons will take us to an island or somewhere.” He was eager to talk on the phone. One subject reminded him of another: Einstein, the opium trade, Native American culture—I lost track. 4

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It was a couple of months later that I rolled up his driveway and saw Mr. Ballard standing in his carport. He looked strong but weary, tall but slumped. He wore a silver bracelet and his ring was a silver buffalo head. He had forged both of them himself. A tangle of turquoise hung from his neck. His weathered cap said “45th Infantry Division—Korean War,” and suddenly I remembered a girl who had wanted to paint me. She wanted me to wear my beret. Horrifically, I had gone to a Halloween party dressed as a “beatnik” and decided the goatee looked good, so I kept it and the hat and the turtleneck for real life. This was a long time ago. I was about twenty. The art teacher’s last name was Kennedy. He played records for his students as they painted. As I held my pose I recognized who was playing, Mingus or somebody. During a break Kennedy and I started talking about the music we liked in common. I remember that he introduced me to the work of clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre. Kennedy had gotten out of the army, or some branch of the service, and gone to Paris, where he had seen the Modern Jazz Quartet playing in a basement. There was a grouchy guy who turned out to be Miles Davis blocking his view the whole time. During a set break, the drummer Connie Kay noticed Kennedy’s cigarette lighter. It was special. Kennedy got it from the military, maybe at the PX, maybe in Korea. It must have been the 1950s. The lighter impressed the great Connie Kay. Kennedy gave him the lighter. Welcome to the N ­ ational Lighter ­Museum

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I can’t remember what kind. It couldn’t have been a common Zippo. There was something interesting about the top of it, I think. A ball? It intrigued a jazz drummer. That was the crux. I’d probably be surprised at how different Kennedy’s story is from the one I remember. I feel sure his name was Kennedy and he gave his nice lighter to Connie Kay. I should have asked Ted Ballard something about the cigarette lighters they used to hand out in Korea but I didn’t. Maybe the human scrotum threw me off. Mr. Ballard said a lot of things that threw me off. “This is a scrotum,” is the way he introduced the scrotum. He said, “When Columbus discovered America they would pay the same for a fat dead man as they would an able-bodied seaman. The captains would pay to have him Shanghaied. You understand what I’m saying? And you say, ‘How do you know all this?’ Well, it’s very simple. When Versailles was built there would’ve been five hundred of these beautiful vases.” He took one, a replica, out of its case. “The ironic thing, what I’m trying to tell you, it’s a grease lamp. This has a diaphragm, spring-loaded. You roll it up, it puts the pressure on top of the grease. Now this is before whale oil. See, that’s another thing people don’t think about. There was no whale oil outside of what the Eskimos had for their own use, until New England. Besides tobacco, whale oil was probably another one of the first commodities. But these are hollow here, the pressure would run this fluid up here and saturate the wick and it would run down this little 6

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funnel here. That’s called a grease lamp. When Christopher Columbus came, they had grease lamps. Everything was grease lamps. Getting back to the heavyset fat man. Okay? And you want to know why they’d pay the same for a dead fat man?” “Why?” I said. “Grease! They rendered ’em. They actually did. It’s rumored they’d even eat ’em.” (Who would? I wondered, afraid to ask.) “But the point is, they wanted the grease. Every embalming method extracted the grease. And it went to the temples, by the way. The British built a railroad from Istanbul to Turkey to wherever, Egypt, and there was no wood, there was no coal, there was no oil, what in the world did they run that locomotive on? Mummies.” Not even Mark Twain at his most misanthropic got into a humor that dark. Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, having traveled back to the sixth century, notes that “there was no gas, there were no candles; a bronze dish half full of condemned butter with a blazing rag floating in it was the thing that produced what was regarded as a light.” Rancid butter was nasty enough for Twain. Mr. Ballard showed me a little cartridge of rocket fuel, and banged it against some surfaces, and when nothing happened, he looked for a needle to poke into it. It was the first of many times he would demonstrate how the technologies of war and smoking are entwined. I recalled one of the earliest newspaper accounts I had found on my subject, a short item in the Philadelphia Times from Welcome to the N ­ ational Lighter ­Museum

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June 29, 1882, ominously titled “A Victim of a Cigarette Lighter,” about a young man “employed in Casper Laager’s barber shop, in the Grand Central Hotel, on Market Street,” who was “badly burned about the hands, arms and face . . . while fooling with a patent cigarette and cigar lighter. The fluid in the lighter took fire and flew in all directions, setting fire to the barber shop, which caused a panic about the hotel.” A lighter sits at the intersection of plaything and weapon. Mr. Ballard wasn’t trying to blow anything up. He just wanted to show me how “every time this thing pops, it sends out one little flake, a microscopic particle. If I had something to open that with. . . . That’s good for about five thousand lights,” he said with obvious admiration for the tiny cartridge. When he finally pried out some powder to show me, it looked harmless, like dandruff. Mr. Ballard wanted to prove the efficacy of the “snuff tube” on a nineteenth-century lighter that he said the French call a “fusee.” When he pushed out the thick fuse to show me how well and completely its flame had been snuffed, I still saw hairy orange tendrils glimmering there from when he had ignited it. He didn’t seem to care. He put the hot rope back in the display case, under the shelf with the rocket fuel. The Handbook of Vintage Cigarette Lighters repeats the rumor that “Blackbeard, the famous pirate, went into battle with smoldering ropes stuck in his hat. If one rope was extinguished, another burning rope was available to fire his guns.” The handbook, in fact, tells me that the flint-and-steel 8

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mechanism on the fusee lighter that Mr. Ballard showed me was “the same mechanism used on matchlock rifles.” Lighters and guns are hard to separate, as we’ll see. “Look at this,” Mr. Ballard said kind of disgustedly, moving some stuff around. “We’re in an earthquake zone and this is what’s happening to my lighters. The earthquake knocks ’em out and I have to come out here and put ’em back up.” “Y’all get a lot of tremors out here?” I asked. Something new to be startled about: the ground opening up under the combustible museum. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Three and four and five a day.” I admit feeling relieved in a purely ageist way. Five earthquakes a day sounded like a whopper old-timers liked to tell at the Rock-A-Way Tavern I had noticed down the street from Mr. Ballard’s house. But when I was safely back home, I found an article on The Atlantic’s website studded with such alarming sentences as “Last month, Oklahoma made headlines when it experienced seven earthquakes— most strong enough to knock dishes off shelves, the largest measuring at a magnitude of 4.3—over the course of a single weekend.” Mr. Ballard handled a bottle with a skull and crossbones on it. That was my own fault. “What is this box?” I had asked. “It says, ‘The Logical Successor to the Flint Lighter,’ this little blue box here? And it says on top, ‘What Makes It Light?’ ” “That’s a good question and I’m gonna show you.” He picked up the cartoonish little bottle of death. It’s the stuff Welcome to the N ­ ational Lighter ­Museum

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the old rummy drinks by mistake in both the novel and the movie Nightmare Alley: wood alcohol. From the faded blue box that had caught my attention, Mr. Ballard shook silver cylinders that looked like the separate parts of a lipstick tube. When he put them together, the fumes from the wood alcohol in one half of the device enflamed the wooly lining when contacted by the antenna-like wire in the other half. “It’s the same as the catalytic converter on a car,” said Mr.  Ballard. “That’s platinum. That little wire is platinum. Now, it has that ability. That’s one of its strange phenomena. Well, it vibrates, they tell me.” Mr. Ballard said he wanted to show me the illegal version. “Why was it illegal?” I asked. “Well, when I say illegal, I mean dangerous,” he said, preparing to demonstrate the larger German model. “Ooooh,” I replied. Much later, as I was leaving, he casually announced, “In Durg I became acquainted with the Gandhi boy, Indira’s son. He was supposed to sign all the papers in case I got any big stuff, to get it out of the country, because a lot of stuff you can’t get out of the country. I was looking for Duesenbergs and whatever. But the point is, while I was there, they fled the country for their lives and left me there. What it was, Pakistan. . . Petarbar is where I was working and that fell to Pakistan. But Farouk, King Farouk of Egypt, he wintered there. And I bought from the national museum, they were given this collection of erotica. Anything American or 10

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European, it was supposed to be destroyed. But instead, I knew the curator of the national museum, and I bought it. I paid him for it and what he done to get clear of it is no business of mine. But the point is, I’ve got part of Farouk’s collection of erotica. We’re talking about hand-painted, water colors, and some pretty good stuff, but it is of an erotic substance, or nature, as the old boy says.” Between such alarming detours, I never managed to ask what kind of lighter the art teacher Kennedy might have given away in that Paris basement. (This is the obvious place for an early note on methodology. After transcribing the interview, I spent two solid days deciding whether Mr. Ballard had actually said “Peshawar” [no, it was definitely Petarbar] and, either way, during which of the many Indo-Pakistani conflicts his erotic adventure must have occurred. Petarbar is a small place and the great mass of Western writers and thinkers don’t seem to care when or if it fell, and if it did, to whom. The War of 1971 made the most sense, but it was hard to imagine much of anything falling to Pakistan in that short melee, and why would Indira Gandhi flee when things were going so well and she was making victorious speeches and whatnot? So . . . the Second Kashmir War? The geography was wrong. Petarbar, on the other hand, is located in the state of Jharkhand, warm in the winter and situated near the West Bengali border, a site of chaos in 1971. Finally, I had the bright idea to call Mr. Ballard. No answer. It was winter, and maybe his sons had taken him on another cruise, just like King Farouk. It was then that Welcome to the N ­ ational Lighter ­Museum

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I decided to just faithfully write down what Mr. Ballard said and rake over any good story of his if it truly threatens to get between us and our scrupulous understanding of cigarette lighters, which follows.)

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Cigarette Lighter

2  Personalized

If a lighter has a name, date and event on it, then it’s a historical document. Ted Ballard

Giving someone your lighter could mean everything (why else would the art teacher still be telling the story?) or nothing. A lighter can be an heirloom, or an afterthought like pocket change. Giving someone a light can mean more. Paul Henreid puts two cigarettes in his mouth, close together, and uses a single flame from his lighter on both. He gives one of the cigarettes to Bette Davis. It means something. It’s the scene from the movie Now, Voyager that everyone remembers. Henreid lights Davis’s cigarette in two previous scenes, but nobody talks about those. They’re conventional lightings, though the first one gives him the chance to stare into her eyes and wonder what makes her so special—a not uncommon use of cigarette lighters in the movies. Before re-watching Now, Voyager I had misremembered. I thought that in the key scene he lit her cigarette from

the burning tip of his own, a romantic flourish for which authors of the spirited collage The Cigarette Book provide the “semantically obscure slang term” (though I’m not so mystified) a “Dutch fuck.” In Green’s Dictionary of Slang, too, the purpose of the Dutch fuck is cynically boiled down to “saving matches.” But surely by zeroing in on the supposed frugality of the Dutch, both sources are overlooking— with perverse obtuseness—the intense intimacy at play. At the moment when the upright psychiatrist played by Lindsay Crouse decides to align herself with “bad man” Joe Mantegna in Mamet’s House of Games, she gives him a Dutch fuck. It has been established that she can lay hands on plenty of matches and has just used a lighter, too. Obviously, something else is going on. “There is always complicity in a cigarette that goes from one hand to another and then from lips to lips,” writes G. Cabrera Infante, but he’s thinking of The Lady from Shanghai. He vividly pictures Rita Hayworth being passed a cigarette “like some social disease.” The implications are tenderer in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. When Alice (Ellen Burstyn) lights a cigarette, takes it from her mouth and transfers it to the lips of hunky bearded rancher Kris Kristofferson, it’s a sign that she’s finally softening toward him, despite the terrible ordeals to which the film’s other men have subjected her. In Easy Rider, Peter Fonda helps himself to a doobie-todoobie Dutch fuck from a stranger at a campfire, late-sixties style. Lee Marvin is so cold in Seven Men from Now that he 14

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shoots a guy and takes a Dutch fuck off the dead man’s still-lit cigarette. As the winsome prostitute Irma La Douce, Shirley MacLaine gives one to herself. “Roll me a cigarette the way you used to at my uncle’s factory,” says Gary Cooper in the tobacco-themed historical melodrama Bright Leaf. “With you breathing down my neck, I remember,” says Lauren Bacall. “Got a light?” coos Anna Karina, her first line in Alphaville. “I came 6,000 miles to give it to you,” says Eddie Constantine. Allan Smethurst, the fleetingly celebrated “Singing Postman” of Norfolk, certainly got it. In part, his composition “Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy?” is a straightforward spoof of addiction. The “little nicotine gal” of the singer’s esteem interrupts such milestones as her wedding vows and childbirth to ask for the eponymous light. But the lights she gets from verse to verse also stand for something else going on “in the dark” and “in the old backyard” and “behind the garden wall.” A lighter is the trinket that enthralls the robot Eve and allows timid WALL-E to try holding her hand. In Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, Yuki Kudo picks up a cigarette lighter with her bare foot and gives her boyfriend a light with her toes. That’s intimacy. A good light makes a connection. In Walker Percy’s epochal novel The Moviegoer, an anonymous boy on the street transcends “his own shadowy Personalized

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and precarious existence” and joins the “resplendent reality” of William Holden just by giving the movie star a light. When the wounded Vito Corleone’s men have been sent away in suspicious circumstances, Michael, the good son, enlists the apprentice baker Enzo. They pretend to be a couple of toughs standing guard outside the hospital. After they’ve bluffed a carload of potential assassins, Enzo’s hand shakes. He can’t even light his trembling cigarette. One, two, three, four, five clicks, the lighter won’t work. Michael takes it, and lights it in one try—like Crouse’s, a pivotal moment. The way you handle a cigarette lighter means something. Bob Hope tossed away souvenir cigarette lighters like they were cheap plastic Mardi Gras beads, but they meant something to the fans who got them. They had Hope’s face stamped on them, because a lighter can be personalized. An individual lighter can have a history, like the one the art teacher gave to Connie Kay. In Strangers on a Train, Robert Walker (who pops a child’s balloon with a cigarette) uses Farley Granger’s lighter to illuminate the face of his soonto-be murder victim, and later tries to frame Granger with the same lighter. He can do it because it’s personal; it’s personalized. Farley Granger should have used matches. Cancer Man, the perpetually smoking X-Files villain, uses a lighter engraved “TRUST NO ONE.” He probably never offers anyone else a light. After all, a cigarette lighter is just the sort of personal object a psychic can fondle for your vibrations. Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle, whose thumb is memorably lit like a cigar in Young Frankenstein) handles 16

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his elderly neighbor’s ornate lighter on The X-Files and immediately envisions her Marie Prevost-like denouement. Fire itself is personal. Doesn’t De Niro make a speech to that effect in Backdraft? And Donald Sutherland? And everybody else in that movie? In his book The Prehistory of Home, purportedly about “the antiquity and diversity of domestic human life,” archeologist Jerry D. Moore starts his chapter on the domestication of fire with an anecdote about a neighbor he calls the “misanthrope.” The misanthrope yells at a woman “walking her dog on the opposite side of the street.” The misanthrope busts up an innocent skateboard ramp with an axe. The misanthrope burns to death, teaching the author an important lesson about “the fragility of the dwelling that contains our uncertain lives.” There’s a desultory and probably inevitable paragraph wedged in there, in which Moore learns “that the misanthrope was an artist, a painter of delicate watercolors of plants and landscapes.” Moore naturally conflates his own experience with the big riddle: Are we in charge or is the fire? A lighter is a false comfort, pretty and tinged with dread, obedient genie bottled up (for now) in your palm, capable of wildness and destruction once you let it out. Unless you’re one of the cleverer protagonists in the Arabian Nights, you’re not going to talk a genie back in. The first line of dialogue of in all of Mad Men is “Yeah, hey, do you have a light?” The series simultaneously romanticizes and scolds us for romanticizing tobacco and its accessories. At the beginning of Season Six, the protagonist Don Draper, Personalized

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years from his service in Korea, accidentally exchanges his army-issue lighter with the nearly identical lighter of a US private on temporary leave from Vietnam (it’s how they recognize each other, like a secret handshake, pulling out their lighters at a bar); Draper is haunted by the oracular inscription on the boy’s Zippo: “IN LIFE WE OFTEN HAVE TO DO THINGS THAT JUST ARE NOT OUR BAG.” “I want you to be yourself,” a photographer tells him just as he looks up from the lighter, puzzled and lost. He’s spent the whole series trying to be somebody else. He’s such a cipher that we assume his own lighter is blank. Don keeps trying to get rid of it but the lighter keeps coming back, a telltale heart. Sean Connery’s first appearance as James Bond (a character explicitly linked with Don Draper; see the finale of Mad Men’s fifth season) begins with the lighting of a cigarette. Up until then Bond has been a mysterious jigsaw puzzle: a flash of playing cards, manicured nails, seal-sleek back of a head, a cigarette case, a voice. As he introduces himself as “Bond, James Bond,” for the first time, the corner of his mouth wrapped around a ciggie, his lighter supplies the action that brings us to his face. The trend is even more pronounced when George Lazenby mounts his too-brief takeover of the franchise. Lazenby’s Bond appears first as a pair of plush pink lips in extreme close-up. For a few long moments he’s nothing but mouth, cigarette like a felled tree, cigarette lighter a rocket ship on the big screen. Godard introduces his undercover Alphaville hero Lemmy Caution 18

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in much the same way: with the flare of a lighter his face blooms from a noir shadow. When Walter Matthau’s washout Buttermaker needs a light in the first scene of The Bad News Bears, a lighter sweeps into the frame, wielded by the Promethean hand of scraggly headed, tinted-sunglasses-wearing delinquent Kelly Leak—destined, though neither character can know it yet, to lead the Bears to their glorious loss. A lighter has an identity and supplies an identity. It’s a stand-in, maybe even a doppelgänger. Gary Cooper-laconic, the self-possessed Japanese tourist played by Masatoshi Nagase in Mystery Train has fashioned his own identity out of delinquent Americanisms, or at least Carl Perkinsisms—the pompadour, the assertive belt buckle, the cigarette behind his ear. But the most important extension of his personality is his lighter, which he fires to life with a cool snap of his fingers, subversively investing the cold mechanism with human warmth. Then he tosses it high in the air like a magician. It makes an astonishing, unfussy landing straight into his front pocket. It’s part of him. I was at the City Grocery Bar in Oxford, Mississippi, with my friend William Boyle, the crime novelist. He had just returned from Brooklyn, his hometown, where he had made the pilgrimage following the death of his beloved grandfather. Bill’s not from the ironic, rarified Brooklyn of contemporary imagination. “I grew up in Bensonhurst in the apartment where Gaspipe Casso used to live,” he can say. He witnessed his first shooting outside Frank & Joe’s Bakery. Personalized

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He saw “Sal Schiavo thwack Eugene Caracarramo in the face with an aluminum bat in Shady Park.” We were at the back table with a bunch of people because an old mutual friend had come to town. Bill took something out of his pocket: his grandfather’s lighter, a little Ronson. He handed it to me and it felt solid with emotional weight. I could make out the name “Joe” in cursive, glinting in a small silver plate affixed to the side. I didn’t need a story. The lighter was the story. It was smooth and I thought it was black in the dim light of the bar. Later Bill told me it’s brown, “a faux wood panel look,” he said. “My grandfather got tuberculosis (from dirty glasses in his sister-in-law’s dive bar) and quit smoking cold turkey after that,” Bill emailed me. He never saw his grandfather with a lighter or cigarette: Joe chewed toothpicks as a substitute. “But he had a drawer in his bedroom full of lighters and flashbulbs and Kodachrome slides, and that drawer was magic to me as a kid. I’d go in there and flick the lighters (the fluid had all evaporated), and I fell in love with that sound.” Bill started smoking in college partly so he could use one of his grandfather’s old lighters, “but it didn’t last long—I think I drunkenly gave it to a pal.” Bill said of his return to Brooklyn to pay respects, “After opening his Johnnie Walker Blue, I went straight to the drawer full of lighters.” A person, a spirit, can inhabit a lighter. There’s more than one reason we’ll encounter cigarette lighters shaped as genie lamps. 20

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The lighter in Strangers on a Train is a beautifully compact carrier of the film’s themes, heavy with spirits of love and malice. It’s decorated with two crossed tennis rackets, literalizing the crossing, doubling and merging of identities (much like the lighter in Mad Men). Its engraved inscription, “A to G,” neatly lays out the motive (“A” is Anne, whom “G” or Guy wants to marry, but his current wife is standing in the way) that makes the “innocent” Guy complicit in Bruno’s “crazy” plot. Guy is the almost prim objet d’art, but he contains a Bruno, the volatile fuel. Marcelline Block, writing in The Guardian, cites the “To George from Ann” lighter in the adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as “a wink and a nod to Hitchcock.” In his cigarette-lighter monologue, Gary Oldman, as Smiley, trots out the shopworn cat-and-mouse cliché, “We’re not so very different, you and I”—practically a thesis statement for Strangers on a Train. As Block can’t help but notice, movie cigarette lighters (and not only those, I would add), “serve as signifiers of a character’s identity, becoming extensions of their owners’ personas.” But identity can slip from palm to palm as easily as a lighter. Sometimes the identity goes and the lighter remains. The Handbook displays “A wonderful Zippo that belonged to a fellow named Rene. Sterling silver in a hard green box.” The “R” in Rene is rolling and ornate, so chuffed with personality that it spills from the bottom of the lighter over to the lid. When Rene opened his lighter, his name cracked in two. A single surface could not contain his initial! But all the engraving in the world couldn’t save him from Personalized

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the grave, whoever he was, this utterly forgotten “fellow named Rene.” When the slimy PI in Blood Simple puts down his lighter (it appears to be a Zippo) for the first time, we get a tantalizing close-up. It’s personalized, all right. His first name is spelled out in lasso letters. Along the thinner edge runs more personal information: ELKS MAN OF THE YEAR. Later, when he forgets the lighter at a crime scene, he says to the victim he’s just shot in the chest, “Who looks stupid now?” You do, we think, gulled by decades of film grammar. The Coen Brothers and their DP Barry Sonnenfeld bear down on the lighter’s impossibly silvery reflection, glowing like a treasure of the Rhinemaidens under a couple of dead, gape-mouthed fish that have been flopped down on top of it, hiding it from all but clever us. Some scenes later, the PI pats his pockets in distress, that universal sign. His eyes widen. He’s as big a sap as the audience. He believes that the little piece of himself he left behind matters. The Coens think they know better. They think a lighter is a postmodern joke. A red herring under an actual fish, as I am certain countless others have noticed before me. I almost hate to Google it (“ ‘red herring’ + ‘blood simple’ + fish’ ” gets 2,400 results in 0.47 seconds). But it doesn’t matter what the Coen Brothers think. They can’t change the facts. A lighter is a clue.

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Cigarette Lighter

3  The Disposability of the Permanent; the Permanence of the Disposable

Well, I really wouldn’t care to scratch your surface, Mr. Kralik, because I know exactly what I’d find: instead of a heart, a handbag. Instead of a soul, a suitcase. And instead of an intellect, a cigarette lighter, which doesn’t work. Miss Novak, The Shop Around the Corner

How did I wind up in Guthrie, on the too-perfectly named South Sooner Road, in a metallic barn stuffed with everything from animal heads to oil paintings, but mostly lighters? It started in a very different storage space, an auction house in Beverly Hills. They were selling some of Bob Hope’s personal effects and I was supposed to write about it for a magazine.

My editor certainly thought lighters were a clue. “What does it say about a man to give out a lighter with his picture on it?” she asked. She made an editorial comment about Bob’s “hammy face.” Hammy face? What photo might she have seen? Bob Hope’s vibe is detached and self-contained: “allergic to horseshit” is the way Norman Mailer put it, while Manny Farber remarked on his “intellectual suppleness and finesse.” One of the running pleasures of his period comedies is how everyone else plays it straight—French aristocrats, cowboys, pirates—while Bob is just Bob in a wig, with what my friend the novelist Megan Abbott called “something harder, stonier behind the grin.” I got cranky and pulled the piece, which stranded me with nagging reflections on Bob Hope and the meaning behind his cigarette lighters, and here we are. People want keepsakes of celebrities. They mopped up Dillinger’s blood with their own clothes from the sidewalk in front of the Biograph. It’s not Bob’s fault! “Gold tone” lighters embossed with his caricature were a jaunty solution. Hope owned more than a couple of different lighters with his face on them. Some fancier ones look like gifts to him. They weren’t the only things Bob Hope owned with his face on them. As I sat through two days of the auction I started to realize why. As I described my terrible epiphany in the neverpublished article (and a never-published short story I tried to pull from the wreckage): “People gave Bob Hope piles and piles of crap wherever he went. Stuff with his name on it, like diamond-studded 24

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belt buckles. Cufflinks and straps of leather with his face. A Cross pen culminating in his own miniscule head, awards for nothing, plaques and bowls, melted-looking clay jugs, frosted glass eagles and airplanes, medallions and plaster busts, a replica of a barber pole. After a while it probably seemed more like a torture than an honor.” President Kennedy presented Bob Hope with the Congressional Gold Medal. Where he is now, it’s doing him about as much good as a cigarette lighter. I felt an ontological chill a year later when Ted Ballard said to me, “You can’t collect one thing without collecting everything, you know what I mean?” The sinking feeling I got at the auction is borne out by Richard Zoglin’s biography of Hope. Once Hope was with the actor Dave Thomas, watching a videotape of Thomas’s brilliant Hope impersonation. “Hope asked if he could get a copy. ‘Take the tape,’ Thomas said, adding jokingly that Hope could take the TV and the VCR too. ‘No,’ said Hope after a moment’s thought, ‘I’ll just take the tape.’ He was so used to getting freebies that he took Thomas seriously.” The funny thing I noticed is that the giveaway lighters that used to jingle annoyingly in Hope’s pockets sold for more than high-end items built to last. Stefano Bisconsini’s photographs of fine twentiethcentury lighters show casings of silver, gold, bamboo, snakeskin, brass, sharkskin, lizard skin, pony skin (!), enamel, chromium, copper, Bakelite, leather and glass. The lighters come with built-in clocks and cigarette cases, pens The Disposability of the Permanent

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and pencils, lipsticks and face powder. They’re decorated with pictures of horses and fish, roosters and peacocks, or come cunningly shaped like pointy-topped German helmets, genie lamps (significantly, as we’ve already seen), donkeys and pelicans, notebooks and typewriters, golf bags and beer steins, cameras and radios, bells, balls, barware, and, of course, pistols. Is it from comic books, movies, or dreams that we recall the gangster cruelly teasing the hero with a pistol that turns out to be nothing but a lighter? By January 12, 1966, when the Riddler tricks Batman with a gun-shaped lighter in the very first episode of the series, it plays like a variation on an already well-known gag. A real gun can be a lighter, as when—in what passes for a “meet cute” in the great, perverse noir Gun Crazy—her future boyfriend shoots the heads of matches off of Peggy Cummins’s sideshow crown. Lemmy Caution activates his cigarette lighter the hard way, with a quick-draw bullet, in Alphaville: is it any coincidence that Godard attended a screening of Gun Crazy not long before he began filming? In countless action movies such as Escape Plan, a guy (Sylvester Stallone in this case) must set off a cathartic explosion with one last bullet (“Boom,” Stallone remarks with quiet gravity before pulling the trigger; “Have a nice day . . . asshole,” quips Arnold Schwarzenegger—in the helicopter from which Stallone is naturally dangling—to the evil warden they have just blown up); or an anti-lighter, shooting cigarettes from the mouths of trembling men. Altman imagines the philandering Frank Butler shakily praising his wife 26

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Annie  Oakley’s marksmanship when she circumcises his stogie: “That was good, that was right in the middle. Did you mean to hit it in the middle?” Their act is as perfect a portrait of marital tension as the one in Gun Crazy is of courtship. Sex, guns and smoke make a natural triangle. First came the pistol and right behind it came the lighter shaped like the pistol. In the seventeenth century, according to the comprehensive illustrated history The Legend of the Lighter, gunsmiths had the idea of “recycling broken pistols by replacing the barrel with a container in which tinder could be stored. Mixed with gunpowder, this produced a fantastic effect—a burst of flame.” Many “historians and collectors,” contend the authors, consider these repurposed weapons the earliest true lighters. Lighters are born of broken things. From the first their usefulness has been entangled with failure. Guns never ceased being an inspiration for lighter designers, even when the connection had become more cosmetic. Mr. Ballard owns a whole set of lighters, nestled in velvet, shaped like guns and swords and daggers. He also has a lighter made from a Colt revolver grip. It’s no coincidence that Twain’s Hank Morgan, before traveling back in time, is head superintendent at the Colt factory, where, at the time Connecticut Yankee was being written, the typesetting machine that would break and ruin Twain was being built. In his first scrap of notes for the book, Twain jots “No pockets in the armor.” No place for a lighter! Yet Morgan finds room enough to bring modern destruction to the sixth century. The Disposability of the Permanent

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The Legend of the Lighter includes a couple dozen photos of lighters shaped like pistols. But it also has blow dryer lighters, football helmet lighters, pool table lighters, tennis racket lighters—boom boxes, pianos, ice cream cones, sunglasses and saxophones, a music box that really works. To confuse things even more, one collectors’ guide features other items shaped like lighters: earrings, cufflinks, bracelet charms—in a double switcheroo, some of the miniscule lighter-shaped charms actually work, making them lighters shaped like bracelet charms shaped like lighters. “Have you got your lighter?” the Mencken-cynical reporter Gregory Peck asks his ratty beatnik friend Eddie Albert in that comedy of doomed love and everlasting despair, Roman Holiday. (Forget Bob Hope: is there anyone left alive who understands why it’s funny to imagine Eddie Albert as a beatnik?) He’s referring to a lighter that doubles as an inconspicuous camera. Peck wants to steal some candid shots of incognito princess Audrey Hepburn. Peck knocks Albert around a good bit throughout the film to keep him from blowing their cover. There must have been some deep satisfaction for a heartland audience to watch the square-jawed American paragon and future Atticus Finch belt the stuffing out of a depraved beatnik. In a sidewalk café Peck and Albert offer a lustrous Hepburn her very first cigarette, a sweet, virginal interlude marred by Albert’s furtive clicking. He advances the reel by turning the flint wheel, his lighter both chivalrous and dastardly. It’s 1953, the Cold War is on, and they give 28

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Albert’s bearded character with the spy camera the last name Radovich. (In Dr. Strangelove, the spy camera that provokes Peter Sellers’s outraged, “You can’t fight in here, gentlemen, this is the war room!” appears to be a matchbox.) The impulse to list the shapes of lighters is irresistible, almost Rabelasian. In his remarkable, occasionally disturbing self-published book, a livestock inspector named Dr. Harold Wallman catalogs the highlights of his 640 collections, the 139th of which, alphabetically speaking, consists of cigarette lighters. “Many of these show advertisements. . . . Also shown are the S. S. Admiral, a real little roulette wheel, Witte Hardware, Navy Pier, naked ladies, and dirty pictures,” he writes with lovely awkwardness. “One is shaped like a can of salmon, another like a penis.” Of Bob Hope’s own lighters, one was the Seattle space needle—not quite as phallic as Dr. Wallman’s treasure, maybe. It was given to Hope by Jack Borg, manager of the Top of the Needle restaurant, a brand-new attraction at the time. The Monroe (Washington) Monitor reported that “vista-view elevators, riding on outside shafts, will whiz patrons to the top of the needle in 40 seconds. The elevator ride will be as exciting as any of the daring rides in the fair’s Gayway.” Borg and a partner are credited with planning “the decor and cuisine to be featured in the West’s tallest restaurant.” Not for the first or last time, a lighter mirrored the latest marvels and spectacles of the age—high-tech, sleek, and doomed to swift obsolescence. The Disposability of the Permanent

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No, “obsolescence” is the wrong word: Mr. Ballard showed me a ninety-eight-year-old “Cole Friction Lighter” that was still working because, he said, “The flints are painted. And it would work forever until that’s broken. And once it breaks, it starts oxidizing from the air.” But technologies, however splendid and reliable, may become swiftly unfashionable. Bob Hope’s space needle lighter and its mod companion, sold together as one lot, went for $896. That throwaway souvenir lighter, the solipsistic trash that irritated my editor so, went for $1,280 all by itself. A colleague tosses away the king of the Hollywood stuntmen’s “one-dollar Zippo” when it doesn’t work. Months later, Hal Needham—the king—borrows the man’s “solid gold hundred-dollar Dunhill.” When it fails to light on the first try Needham throws it from the window of a moving car, a memory he dawdles over with unseemly relish in his autobiography. Stuntmen also shoot each other in the legs with arrows for a witty prank, it turns out. That abandoned hundred-dollar Dunhill reminds us that for a long time, lighters were aspirational. “I remember when I was a kid the adult guys always wanted a Dunhill or an S. T. Dupont. You lust for something you can’t have, for the highest price,” Mr. Ballard reflected. “Rich men loved this stuff. Wealthy people had lighters. I’ve got a big old safe and it’s full of Dunhills, Cartiers, whatever.” It’s with a Dunhill that the pint-sized sociopath and child of privilege Gregor satisfies his firebug tendencies 30

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in The Serial, Cyra McFadden’s satire of 1970s Bay-Area affluence. The rich can get away with things. We learn in The Legend of the Lighter that Dunhill managed to skirt around wartime metal rationing and keep turning out their illicit luxury product for a while, thanks to a Swiss connection. “Only the wealthy had matches,” said Mr. Ballard. “The poor people—the les miserables in the French movies—they worked in the match factories and powder factories.” A 1909 editorial rails against phossy jaw, “as horrible an ill as leprosy, that is contracted by the workers—poor duffers— in factories where strike-anywhere matches are made.” And while it’s clear that match industry bigwigs (“rapacious global capitalist employers,” contemporary historian Seth Koven calls them) “did nothing to protect workers” from this terrible hazard (though they did find time to dock already meager wages for the crime of “dirty feet”), you can get matches for free now. During how narrow a stretch were they the indulgence that Mr. Ballard conjures? There is evidence that some early nineteenth-century matches were costly, but thank God this book is about cigarette lighters, so who cares? A gold lighter encapsulates crime boss Nucky Thompson’s kingly status in the opening credits of Boardwalk Empire. And it’s not her perfect murder of Joe Mantegna that completes Lindsay Crouse’s dark turn in House of Games, but her pinching of a stranger’s slim gold lighter in the movie’s final scene. The American popular imagination, with its Puritan streak, may be skittish when it comes to golden lighters. The Disposability of the Permanent

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When the struggling restaurateur in Big Night test-drives a brand-new 1958 Cadillac sedan, the salesman cradles the car’s lighter for him like a sacred treasure, and the cinematographer frames and shoots it like a movie star—in slo-mo, too, for glamour. The glowing orange coil stares into the camera like an eye and the lighter comes to resemble another charismatic leading man: HAL in 2001. “This is called a fair weather lighter,” Mr. Ballard said of a magnifying glass that looked an awful lot like a monocle on its stand. “You put it in the sunlight, focus it, you put your cigarette in there or whatever, a piece of paper, and the sun would catch it on fire. What happened was, lookee. This was a lighter first. Then they started fooling around with it and putting it in their eyes.” Lighters became monocles? True or not, a neat illustration of the technology’s aristocratic lineage. I hated to check it out. But as Mr. Ballard himself told me, “If you want to learn something you got to get it all in the right perspective. You got to know which come first, the chicken or the egg, and like I was telling you, it’s so interesting when you finally get it all in the same direction. It’s almost unbelievable.” The optometrist James R. Gregg scratches his head over it in his charmingly written 1965 overview for laypeople, The Story of Optometry: were lenses originally for burning or for magnification? A lens from ancient Ninevah “is flat on one side, convex on the other, apparently polished for a purpose . . . it is speculative to attribute any optical use to it, though it would be ideal as a burning lens.” Gregg finds the 32

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“first literary evidence of use of lenses” in Aristophanes’s The Clouds, when Socrates talks about a lens used for lighting fire. Several centuries later, Pliny knows that “lens-shaped crystals” can be used as fair weather lighters but “apparently did not appreciate that the crystal could also be used as a magnifying glass.” Meanwhile, author D. C. Davidson finds evidence of Roger Bacon using “a single convex lens” as a “hand magnifier,” but that’s not until relatively late in the thirteenth century. (I learn by reading the medievalist Johannes Fried that Bacon also “proposed the use of magnifying glasses as military weapons.”) So the evidence leans in Mr. Ballard’s favor, as usual, though the connection may not be as satisfyingly direct as his instructive parable would have it. Doubting Mr. Ballard was generally a losing proposition. When he showed me a souvenir pipe in the shape of the Graf Zeppelin, he told me that people smoked them onboard, in the smoking section, a scenario I found incredible. Yet the tiniest amount of nitpicking research shows that there was smoking, even in the Hindenburg’s bar. (They kept exactly one lighter onboard, and it was carefully monitored.) Dr. Gregg is frustrated that Confucius “casually mentioned a cobbler wearing spectacles but he does not say for what. They may have been to shield his eyes from light.” (Davidson’s monograph Spectacles, Lorgnettes and Monocles adds the tantalizing detail that Confucius “recommended his cobbler to use spectacles to ease his eyes after his wife had thrown pepper in his face.”) The Disposability of the Permanent

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“English in origin, the monocle became the caricaturist’s symbol of the ‘great English aristocrat’ from about 1800,” writes Davidson. Like the elegant lighter with which it shares, at least, a common ancestor, its use lies in fashion as much as in function. A nineteenth-century German pamphleteer comments with disdain, “Numerous young people with normal vision use a monocle with a plain glass . . . to lend themselves an amiable air of impudence and to make themselves noticed.” Hal Needham’s anarchic gesture—tossing away a coveted Dunhill like a piece of litter—crystallizes the paradox of the lighter: the most expensive and desirable one may be useless; the cheapest one may harness the universe’s most elemental powers and save or destroy a life. As I was on the threshold of leaving his place, Mr. Ballard said, “My granddad told me a riddle one time. He said, ‘Riggama-riggama-rocket. What is it that the poor man throws away and the rich man puts in his pocket?’ ” The answer is snot. “Rich man uses a handkerchief and a poor man, he slings it,” Mr. Ballard said. He demonstrated, running the back of his hand under his nose and flinging away the imaginary mucus. A Bic costs $2.13 with tax at the Chevron on the corner a couple of blocks up the street from my house. But people build collections of them. I thought I remembered Megan Abbott telling me that white Bics were especially soughtafter. I emailed to ask about her source and she wrote back, “I think I found out on Google—though now I see they are bad luck!” 34

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A warning from Urban Dictionary: “The real history to the white lighter myth and why they are unlucky is based on four famous and revolutionary musicians of the second half of the 20th century. Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrex [sic], Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain were all left-handed, all died at the age of 27, and all their autopsies reported that a white bic lighter was found in their pockets. This is why it is said that white lighters are unlucky. So if you are 27 and left-handed, don’t use a white bic lighter, you will die.” Do I really need to add a postscript on the myriad ways in which this is baloney? But it was a Bic that Richard Pryor used to set fire to himself. That little psycho Kenard, minutes before gunning down Omar, was trying to squirt lighter fluid on a cat. The Bic laid out next to Omar’s body on The Wire is blue. A 1972 cobalt blue Bic J1 (same color I just bought at my neighborhood Chevron), its monolithic contours familiar to anyone who has visited a convenience store, has been part of MoMA’s permanent collection since 2005. It’s listed in the museum’s catalog as “disposable” yet it’s in the “permanent” collection. Ted Ballard knows this territory. The very first thing out of his mouth after I shook his hand in greeting was “I begin to realize that I can’t take ’em with me.” He had said the same thing to me on the phone months before. The seven-plus decades he had devoted to amassing these exquisite and specialized material goods had ironically, or inevitably, put him in a stoic frame of mind. Searching for the tiny key to one of his display cases he remarked, “That’s The Disposability of the Permanent

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something else: I’m going blind. Besides dying one day at a time, I’m gonna be blind before I ever die, unfortunately. I’m talking about my eyesight and my damn mind is gonna go. Let me tell you, these people talk about your golden years and all that? Well, I’ve got news for you: it sucks. It’s a big, big bunch of lies. But I’ve learned one thing in life, and that’s people are no damn good, and if you got it you can lose it and if you ain’t you cain’t.” Yet just the mention of a lighter-related topic—Lucite, for instance—would bring back his boyish enthusiasm. (He traced the rise of the Lucite lighter back to the jewelry and trinkets made from shattered windshields by the survivors of crashing B-19s. “Aluminum from shot-down aircraft . . . was used as lighter casings,” The Legend of the Lighter informs us.) “I was coming over here to show you something, but what was it?” Mr. Ballard said near the end of our morning together. “That’s okay, everything in here is interesting,” I said. “Oh, it’s unreal!” he barked with such sudden and unrestrained joy that I couldn’t help laughing in agreement. “Every time I try doing this I end up breaking something,” he said, trying to disentangle one of his rare specimens. “I want to help you but I’m afraid to,” I said. “It’s like dying,” he replied. “You gotta do it by yourself.” It could be that Mr. Ballard’s sense of encroaching loss, to which he kept returning in our conversation, accounts for his affection for what he calls “lost periods” of lighters. Technology kept changing so fast, and so many ingenious 36

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lighters were forgotten in its wake. It’s easy to sense the kinship he feels with those underdogs. “This is the most reinvented thing on the planet earth, take my word for it,” he said with mounting energy, after showing me some Venetian bronze “strikers” that were in vogue only from about 1900 to 1910. “There’s nothing else! You can’t even. . . . I could let you think for a month. Not a safety pin, a straight pin, an automobile—nothing more reinvented than a way to make fire. Nothing! Never!” Mr. Ballard’s frontier pessimism gave his discourse a refreshing mystical bent. He was going to call one piece in his collection his “pride and joy” before correcting himself. “They’re all my pride-and-joys,” he said, sounding almost Biblical when he added, “I think no more of the best than I do the least.” On a German regimental pipe: “You could say maybe it’s ceremonial, because everything’s ceremonial in one way or another.” His ecumenical outlook cut both ways. Describing a lighter he called a “break-spark” because you break an electrical current when you use it, he added dryly, “And that’s one thing I’ve had to do through the years is come up with names for this crap.” Starting in 2010, that little piece of crap the Bic J1 stood erect as a soldier next to a wavy orange Walter Zeischegg stacking ashtray in MoMA’s “Shaping Modernity: Design 1880–1980” exhibition. Spelling it “Bic” is good enough for Elmore Leonard, so it’s good enough for me. In Rum Punch, cigarette-craving Jackie Burke (“Jackie Brown” in the movie) uses a tan one. On the The Disposability of the Permanent

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Bic website, it’s always BIC, all caps, and always followed by that officious little “R” in the circle. (“What has become of BIC perfume?” plaintively asks the official FAQ. Short answer: It’s still available in Iran! Here is a nice place for the stray fact, recounted in The Legend of the Lighter, that lighters “filled with light perfume, rather than the usual gasoline” were marketed to women in the early twentieth century.) Semmes Luckett, who was once Hunter S. Thompson’s right-hand man, told me about a silver Bic sheath, inlaid with turquoise, that he had in the 1970s. “The Bic fit perfectly in there,” he said. “The sheath gave it heft.” Yes, I thought. That’s what Bics lack. Heft. Zippos are culturally heftier. They were never meant to be thrown away. As The Handbook of Vintage Cigarette Lighters tells us, “Zippos were reliable and came with the best guarantee—if it breaks, Zippo will fix it for free!” And the Zippo feels reliable in a deeper psychological way. As The Legend of the Lighter points out (in a 1995 edition), its design “has remained unchanged since it first appeared on the market in 1932.” David Poore, author of Zippo: The Great American Lighter, cites more recently discovered information and argues that Zippo inventor George Blaisdell first modified the design of “an awkward Austrian lighter” and created his American icon in 1931, a year earlier than previously believed. Blaisdell “wasn’t real impressed” with the Austrian lighter, writes Poore, the revised and expanded second edition of his history still peppered with unapologetic colloquialisms that feel appropriate to the subject. 38

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Looking at the earliest nickel-finished, rectangular Zippos, it’s easy to see why people were eager to deface and glorify them. They’re blank canvases. In a section of Stephen King’s novel Revival that’s set in the late 1960s, the narrator visits the school’s “smoking area . . . behind the vocational tech building . . . where the burns and hippies hung out.” The coolest of the bunch flashes “a Zippo that had a snake and DON’T TREAD ON ME engraved on the side”—a fistful of genuine rock-and-roll revolution and industrial branding. Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, classified by Netflix as “Independent”—that’s a corporate guarantee!—stars such preapproved figures of rebellion as Iggy Pop, the White Stripes, Tom Waits, RZA and GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, and Bill Murray. The cigarette, like the Zippo, is a punk accessory bequeathed by an oligarchic entity. “Part pop art, part military artifact, Zippo lighters were sold in PX stores in-country and engraved with personalized messages and drawings at Vietnamese village stalls,” writes Sherry Buchanan in the glossy Vietnam Zippos. The authors of The Legend of the Lighter, who, despite their book’s folkloric title, seem to harbor a general paranoia about being suckered, imagine, on the other hand, that present-day tourists searching for left-behind relics “are now presented with Zippo lighters, often complete with emotional inscriptions—messages scribbled only hours earlier by the proprietor of the local tourist trade.” Lighter culture can be shady. Someone stole Semmes’s silver sheath. He thinks he knows the culprit, a celebrity The Disposability of the Permanent

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I’m not allowed to name. Lighters get borrowed and never returned, passed around and pocketed without a conscious thought. It’s okay to steal a lighter from your most trusting friend; always keep a few hidden away, say the serious smokers of my acquaintance. Even when that champion conniver Bruno takes Guy’s lighter in Strangers on a Train, it seems at first like an innocent mistake. Runaways lead singer Cherie Currie, playing the most troubled of the troubled teens in the bizarre 1980 artifact Foxes, has her Bic in a sheath, too, just like Semmes, plus the foresight to wear it on a string around her neck in almost every scene. You know she’s dead when it drops to the floor, another lighter twinning its owner. You can put it in a sheath and wear it around your neck but you’re going to lose it one day, if only in that final way that preoccupies Mr. Ballard. The first Zippo was the first lost Zippo. In a story that sounds a little too convenient (though who am I to judge?), Linda Maebon, resident historian of the Zippo Museum, told a newspaper reporter that mere days before the museum opened in 1997, the then-current CEO had been rifling through the desk “handed down from each of Zippo’s chief executive officers” when he “happened to find a trap door embedded in the desk, opened it and found a very old lighter” complete with a tag “proclaiming it the first Zippo lighter along with the words: ‘Do not touch.’ ” “Why, they’re so popular I had three of them stolen from me in one year,” wrote iconic WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle, in a column that comes perilously close to sounding 40

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like a Zippo ad (“They’ll burn in the wind, and pilots say they are the only kind that will light at extreme altitudes. . . . I began smoking twice as much as usual just because I enjoyed lighting the thing”). The funniest thing Mr. Ballard said to me at the remains of the National Lighter Museum wasn’t a joke at all, though at first I thought it was. As he was about to demonstrate another of his artifacts he said, “Now I need a lighter, and that’s the hardest thing to find, a lighter. I don’t carry one. Do you have a lighter?” “No,” I said. I’m a witness that not even Ted Ballard can find a lighter when he needs one, though he did explain to me later, “I don’t believe in refurbishing my lighters all the time. It’s like collecting clocks and having to wind the sons of bitches, pardon the expression.” He found some matches. “I don’t smoke. Never smoked in my life. Let me heat this up.” Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock unfolds in a series of unique, jewel-like scenes depicting the whirlwind twenty-four-hour love story between an Indiana soldier about to ship out (it’s 1945) and a young woman he meets by chance. There’s a mostly wordless sequence after they’ve impulsively married, their first breakfast as man and wife. Somehow the way they prepare and drink their cups of coffee says everything about the night before. Robert Walker, as the soldier, pats his bathrobe, looks all around for a light. He’s playing to the sweet, vulnerable type The Disposability of the Permanent

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that Hitchcock later cast him against in Strangers on a Train, in which he also pats his pockets—a gesture movie audiences have seen a lot—before being given the fateful lighter by Farley Granger. In The Clock, Judy Garland, the dewy bride, produces a lighter, too. Walker lights his cigarette and starts to pocket Judy’s lighter. She clucks at him cutely and holds out her hand, smarter than Farley Granger. Walker may have gotten everything else but he’s not getting her lighter. It’s a typically adroit touch in this beautiful little movie. Judy’s lighter definitely isn’t a Zippo, though I intended to double-check that fact at the Zippo homepage. When I sent out a mass email in September of 2014, asking friends for their favorite lighters in pop culture, a couple of them told me about this amazing list that the company maintained of every Zippo ever featured in a movie. By the time I got around to clicking on it in early 2015, the link was dead. that page no longer exists, tweeted the person responsible for Zippo’s Twitter account when I asked. Something about the answer/nonanswer sounded severe in a Soviet way. I pressed a little more: not sure, all we know is that it’s gone. How many movies were on it, though? In its heyday? sorry, not sure about that either. Still, of the two name-brand peoples’ lighters, Zippo seems to be much savvier and more confident than Bic about its place in the culture. As Mr. Ballard said to me, “Remember, when I was a kid, the war come first. You done without sugar, you done without candy, you done without lighters. All the lighters went to the military.” 42

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“What about tobacco?” I asked. “Well, tobacco was always . . . my grandfather had tobacco plants growing back behind the barn.” “With the coming of World War II,” write the authors of The Cigarette Book, “Zippo dedicated all its manufacturing capacity to supplying the US military, an astute move that ensured the Zippos would become part of cultural history.” (Is it possible that the art teacher’s unusual lighter was a Zippo after all? As Ernie Pyle reported from the front, “Zippos are not available at all to civilians. In Army PXs all around the world, where a batch comes in occasionally, there are long waiting lists.”) In contrast—aside from being ensconced in the Museum of Modern Art—Bics seem truly disposable. The Handbook, alphabetically arranged, skips right from a 1940 chromeplate Benlow to a 1938 German lighter manufacturer with the historically uncomfortable name Blitz. If the urban legend surrounding the Bic is all about death, the Zippo wins there, too. When I first began desultorily poking around the Internet on the subject, a “bullet hole Zippo” immediately popped up for sale—that is, a Zippo lighter manufactured with a fake bullet hole in it, representing many stories of soldiers apocryphally (and occasionally for real; see the testimony of Colonel Frank Vavrek, for example, in Buchanan’s Vietnam Zippos) saved from death by the Zippos pocketed over their hearts. Now that’s American branding. The Bic company, so chicly fatalistic, is French. The Disposability of the Permanent

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4  Masters of Fire

Who is the Great Magician who can change a lush meadow into a raging sea of flames? Co-authors of The Legend of the Lighter imagining the thoughts of “nomadic tribes”

The historian of religion Mircea Eliade cites a myth in which “the aged women of the tribe ‘naturally’ possessed fire in their genital organs . . . but kept it hidden from men, who were able to get possession of it only by trickery.” Hmm. “What is it about that thing?” asks Mad Men’s Venus/Madonna Joan Harris, coaxing the perpetually boyish Bob Benson into relinquishing her coffee table lighter. “Little boys love it.” In Tati’s Trafic, policemen gather like little boys around an impounded Swiss army knife of an automobile, and even stand outside childishly waving goodbye as it departs, though it’s disingenuous to single out the combo coffee maker/cigarette lighter in a car with amenities that include a barbecue grill and a hot shower.

“Masters of fire,” Eliade says the old shamans were called, and certainly it’s an archetypal scene, whether the tale is of a time-traveling geek landed in prehistory or dystopian future, or a pith-helmeted Western explorer who has hacked his way deep into “uncharted territory”: a cluster of troublesome natives leaping back and bowing down, awed and suddenly docile, as the pale dude stands on an outcropping before them and flicks his Bic. It’s always a short leap to the more ominous flare of gunpowder. Twain’s Yankee boasts that he can “make everything—guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery.” In the Bing Crosby movie he’s a humbler blacksmith-turned-mechanic, but his first miracle (not in the book) comes when he’s about to be burned at the stake and removes the glass face of his pocket watch, using it as a burning lens or, as Mr. Ballard called it in the previous chapter, “fair weather lighter,” to destroy the parchment from which his death decree is being read. For extra comedy he sets fire to Merlin’s robe. “Smiley, you’re burning up a little there,” Bing says, echoing the anachronistic wisecracks spouted by his partner Bob Hope in costume dramas like The Princess and the Pirate and Monsieur Beaucaire. Bing tops off his escalating wizardry by striking a wooden match. In the novel, the Yankee’s second miracle involves a large quantity of blasting powder. Rod Taylor takes out what looks like a lighter but no, it’s just an especially swell matchbox, and blinds the advancing 46

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Morlocks (like helpless Jimmy Stewart warding off lumbering Raymond Burr with his flashbulb in Rear Window) by lighting a match. The time traveler in Wells’s novel (The Time Machine, of course) does the same, and after losing his box finds some “loose matches” in his “trouser pocket.” But when the next crisis comes, he is distraught to discover that his “matches were of that abominable kind that light only on the box.” He should have brought a lighter! When Ash says, “All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up. See this? This . . . is my BOOM STICK. A 12-gauge double-barreled Remington, S-Mart’s top of the line. That’s right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan,” to his medieval fantasy-world captors in Army of Darkness, it’s both parody and epitome of a well-worn convention. Bing’s persona was always a populist one—even on the few occasions when he played posh, as in High Society or Road to Singapore, his greatest pleasure was to goose the snobs—so his use of the fair weather lighter makes us think not so much of Mr. Ballard’s monocle theory as of boyhood play in the schoolyard. The decline and fall: from Eustace Tilly to Dennis the Menace. Porky uses his magnifying glass to light the firecrackers in Alfalfa’s back pocket in one of the Our Gang comedies. Alfalfa is reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” for which the explosions in his pants provide distressing and hilarious sound effects, shuttling us from boyish pranks to war again, as does Twain, of course. And William Golding. Is Porky related to Piggy? Piggy’s glasses, which light the Masters of Fire

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signal fire in Chapter 2, appear on the cover of a recent massmarket paperback of Lord of the Flies. The narrator of the Julian Barnes novel Flaubert’s Parrot has it on good authority that Piggy’s glasses could never light a fire. Piggy’s prescription is wrong. It’s a mistake, thinks the narrator, that “very few people, apart from oculists, opticians, and bespectacled professors of English would notice.” When Ted Ballard was showing me the fusee lighter, its cotton fuse treated with bat manure for the nitrates it contains, he said it was similar to the fuse on a cannon and I asked whether the early cannon fuses likewise employed guano. He began his answer with a typically epistemological twist: “I tell people back in the cave days, if the truth be known, and there’s no way of knowing, the first commodity or product to sell to another cave person was something that would light easier. The old medicine man, the old wizard, he told ’em go find a bat cave and go find your straw, your sticks, any debris that you find in that bat cave is going to have magical power. So, what happened is, uh, the Chinese discovered gunpowder, and all their stuff has got bats painted on their porcelains, and they begin to worship, in a slight way, the bat. They liked the phoenix, too. The thing that rises from the ashes.” Guiltily fact-checking Mr. Ballard (“they begin to worship, in a slight way, the bat”?) with a couple of dictionaries of symbols I have lying around, I do see that in China the bat can mean health, happiness, and good luck. And in my 48

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Dictionary of Ancient Deities, I come across Fu-Shen, who “began life as a mortal judge. During his career he issued an edict proclaiming that small men should have the same rights as other people.” He eventually became “a god of happiness. He is often shown in the company of the god of long life and the god of salaries. His symbol is the bat.” I’m sorry I doubted Mr. Ballard. His “back in the cave days” is an inevitable prepositional phrase here. The thing you probably know as the “flint wheel” on your lighter is actually ferrocerium, a man-made alloy that’s been sparking lighters since 1903. Maybe we have persisted in calling it “flint” because the thought is so stable and comforting: the lighter has almost from the first been associated with the caveman knocking one stone against another stone. Fred’s last name was Flintstone, wasn’t it? And he and his dimwitted neighbor Barney Rubble advertised cigarettes. Fred flicks his lighter percussively to add happy syncopation as he sings the jingle: “Winston tastes good like a [snap, snap] cigarette should.” Rubbing a couple of rocks or sticks together and making a spark is a kind of lighter, of course. “Man’s first discovery was fire,” said Mr. Ballard. “His first invention was a way to make it. And we call that a lighter. And if you smoke, it’s called a cigarette lighter or a pipe lighter or whatever.” So we narrow our focus. The word “cigarette” helps. Before there can be cigarette lighters, there must be cigarettes. Other than Fred and Barney, not too many cavemen were lighting up. I asked Mr. Ballard when cigarettes became popular and Masters of Fire

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he grew animated. “Okay, you have the pipe to begin with. Because the Indian burned the pipe. Come on back here and let me show you. The North American Indians had smoked three thousand years when Columbus discovered America. Remember one thing first. There was no smoking nowhere else in the world when Columbus discovered the New World. None! No smoking. No.” I’m not sure we ever got to cigarettes. That’s when the scrotum pouch came out, and the bamboo pipe, and all the pipes he showed me before he said, “So . . . pipes. Seems there’s jillions of pipes. I don’t really necessarily collect pipes.” The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture agrees that “pipe smoking was the near-universal method” of smoking among Native Americans, though it intriguingly lists “cigarettes wrapped in corn husks” as one variant. The Anglo-centric Social History of Smoking quotes a Victorian, Mrs. Romer, on a surprising thing she noticed in foreign lands around 1843: “The beggars in the streets have paper cigars (called cigarettes) in their mouths.” In his scholarly work Bad Habits, John C. Burnham writes that the first cigarettes in the United States were “the smoke of fringe and deviant groups. No ‘real man’ would smoke a cigarette, and no one who could have afforded a cigar would have taken a cigarette.” That began to change “with the quick smoke of a cigarette on the battlefield,” a habit some men carried into peacetime. Historian of the American South Charles Regan Wilson traces the increase in national cigarette smoking to Bonsack’s 50

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industrial cigarette-rolling machine, invented in 1880, and calls the period during and after the Civil War “the era of cigarettes.” (As we saw in the first chapter, cigarette lighters were already burning down barber shops by 1882.) Before that, the American way of consuming tobacco (as opposed, consciously, to the European way) was chewing. As Wilson writes, “The frontier now seemed to be setting the tone for society. English traveler Charles MacKay thought the national symbol for the United States should not be the eagle but the spittoon.” In the 1950 film Bright Leaf, Bonsack, a Virginian, is transformed into Barton, a Connecticut Yankee (the cigarette-rolling machine and Twain’s typesetting machine are similar, except for the fact that one worked and one didn’t), who declares with bright-eyed cheer that he wants to make “cigarette smoking the cheapest habit in America.” Roy C. Flanagan—writing in 1938 and, it must be noted, at the behest of the American Tobacco Company—shares that egalitarian gusto: “For the first time, the finest tobacco became available to poor as well as rich.” Flanagan pinpoints Richmond, Virginia, as the “birthplace of the modern cigarette.” He traces its “primitive” origins to Turkey and the Crimean War. It’s always war. “European officers learned to like the Oriental paper-wrapped ‘cigars,’ ” writes Flanagan. “They brought the materials back with them to Paris and to London, and before 1870 a new smoking vogue was established . . . by 1872, cigarettes similar to those we have today were being manufactured in Richmond.” Masters of Fire

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Yes, but if Cecil B. DeMille’s research was accurate at all (his movie rolls out ostentatious credits for “material compiled by” and “based on data from”), they were still, as G. Cabrera Infante writes, “such a novelty circa 1875” that in The Plainsman, “a cigar smoking Gary Cooper, playing a virile but doomed Wild Bill Hickock, is astonished to see his first cigarette. . . . ‘Hey, mister,’ calls out uncouth Cooper, ‘your toothpick is on fire!’ ” (Infante has some of the details wrong. The scene takes place ten years earlier than he suggests, just after the war and Lincoln’s assassination. This is the kind of movie comfortable with the incredible expository line, “Mr.  Lincoln, we’ll be late for the theater.” There’s no exclamation point in Cooper’s bit about the cigarette, either, nor does he “call out” in an “uncouth” way or act very “astonished” as Infante writes. The actual line goes, “Hey, uh, your toothpick is on fire,” delivered offhandedly, a witty verbal shrug.) The cigarette smoker fiddles with his tiny accessory, a passive bystander during a riverboat poker game. When Cooper pulls a gun on a cheat, the bystander’s “cigareet” dangles libidinously. “He’s my friend!” he crows at Cooper’s heroics, eyes alight, his ash as precariously long as Nathan Thurm’s. Soon a woman—Calamity Jane, no less—is mocking the size of his smoke. He later compensates by finding a big rail on which to try to run her out of town: “This woman’s going to get what’s coming to her!” We can’t get away from Freud, can we? Cooper is the ruthless tobacco baron in Bright Leaf, too, and though he makes all his money off of cigarettes 52

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he says, “Don’t like ’em,” when offered one of his own brand, pointedly whipping out his manly cigar instead. (Peter Gay’s biography informs us that Freud began smoking in 1880 at age twenty-four—cigarettes! He famously graduated to cigars. “Look here,” said Mr. Ballard. He showed me a bronze of a woman rising triumphant on a tortoise’s back from a tangle of snakes. “Fuel goes in there. This could hang on the wall or it could set on a table. This was a smoker’s lamp. Grandpa could set there and do whatever he wanted to. The turtle represents the universe, the snake is the darkness and unknown. And these would’ve belonged to . . . or made for . . . this would’ve been psychiatric, a psychologist. This would’ve been, what’s his name, the father of it?” I asked whether he meant Freud. “Yeah! This would’ve belonged to him.”) In the testosterone bonanza Stalag 17, the epitome of the coolly masculine cynic, William Holden (recipient of that existential light in The Moviegoer), can trade forty-five cigarettes to his Nazi captors in exchange for an egg because, as he says, “What was I gonna do with ’em? I only smoke cigars.” “When Christopher Columbus came,” Mr. Ballard told me, “his sailors were Turkey people, Moslems. Now, the first load that he sent back to Isabella’s court was whatever little gold he could steal from the locals, and tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, stuff the world had never seen before. He sent tobacco. But those crewmembers took the seeds to Turkey.” Not sure where he picked that up. Over at The National Review they got spitting mad at the idea somebody in the State Department suggested Columbus might have Masters of Fire

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had a single Muslim onboard, calling it a “multicultural fantasy” and hinting darkly at a conspiracy designed to “make Americans more accepting of an influential Islamic presence.” That really doesn’t sound like Ted Ballard’s style. I checked into it. Mr. Ballard is right that some crewmembers (though I can’t detect a Muslim among them) brought tobacco leaves home, if not seeds. “Even when seeds, rather than leaves, were brought to European shores, tobacco was a difficult and needy plant to cultivate,” writes Christopher Snowdon. And Marcy Norton adds that “the dried weeds initially registered only as a faint impression” among the heaps of sparkling loot the invaders planned to haul in. Several sources mention Rodrigo de Jerez, who accompanied Columbus on his first voyage and was thrown into prison back in Spain on suspicion of devilry when his neighbors saw him “walking around with smoke coming out of his nose,” as one history of tobacco bluntly puts it. Infante, ever sardonic, reminds us that when de Jerez was released from custody several years later, he “found that all his countrymen were smoking and not going to gaol for it!” Tobacco made it to Turkey, as we all know. The president of Turkey claimed not too long ago that “Muslim sailors reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus.” But I can’t find a hint of smoking in the Ottoman Empire before the seventeenth century. Eric Burns quotes a traveler who saw “an unfortunate Turk conducted about the streets of Constantinople in 1610, mounted backward on an ass with 54

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a tobacco pipe driven through the cartilage of his nose, for the crime of smoking.” And that guy got off easy. Murad the Cruel, when he was running things, would amble around in disguise and offer to share his tobacco with people on the street. If they said okay, he’d have them beheaded. So who brought the smokes? Tobacco came to Turkey from the New World, as Mr. Ballard said, but apparently not by the direct route he envisioned. The Dutch and the English are among those who have been blamed, writes Mehrdad Kia, who also records that Turkish tobacco farming “was legalized in 1646, and in a few years the crop was cultivated on a large scale across the empire.” “And even Camel, you pick up any package of Camels: ‘Turkish tobacco,’ ” Mr. Ballard said. “Okay. In fact, when Camel got so upset when they was gonna take Joe Camel out, they wanted to move their whole outfit to Turkey. Well, I was coming over here to show you something, but what was it? I told you I’m getting old.” Here, if you don’t know, Mr. Ballard is referring to Camel’s cartoon mascot, who many thought was designed to attract underage smokers. I hate to use Wikipedia as a source, but this quotation is perfect in its sad way: “The character lacked many camel traits.” Among Mr. Ballard’s possessions is a poster of an applecheeked boy puffing on a pipe. “They did target children,” he said, and paraphrased the visual message: “ ‘Light up my pipe with Bull Durham and this is the effect that you get.’ ” “Yeah, he looks pretty happy with himself,” I said. “When is that from?” Masters of Fire

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“The Irish influx in New York,” Mr. Ballard guessed, pegging the kid as Irish. “I don’t know, what? Eighteenthirties? Forties?” Burnham mentions a New York retailer in the late 1880s who “hung out a glass sign, ‘No cigarettes sold to boys,’ and the boys of the area threw rocks at it and broke it.” But we were tracking down the first cigarette to help us find out exactly what a cigarette lighter might be. There’s a report of something that seems to be a cigarette as far back as 1518, in Yucatán, Mexico, when an Indian chief gives Captain Juan de Grijalva a smoke. “These tubes,” writes Infante, “slowly consumed themselves without giving forth a flame. . . . The chief indicated to Grijalva that he should inhale the smoke—which never could happen with a cigar.” But as Infante goes on to acknowledge, it was “probably Spain” that gave us the modern cigarette. A helpful timeline appended to Robert K. Heimann’s Tobacco & Americans suggests that everyone is right, with Columbus finding “natives smoking tobacco rolls,” the French manufacturing cigarettes—“previously a beggar’s smoke in Spain”—in 1843 (the Andalusian cigarette girl Carmen first appears in 1845), and “Russian, Turkish, French and British troops” smoking Turkish cigarettes in Crimea, a fad that spreads to the states by 1865 or so, with “skilled European rollers imported by New York tobacco shops.” Heimann also notes the impact of “Bonsack’s cigarette machine.” By 1921, the cigarette becomes “the leading form of tobacco consumption.” 56

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Infante describes the cigarette smoker in The Plainsman as “effete.” (He’s more amphibian, I think.) Later, that character shoots Gary Cooper in the back, summing up cigar lover Infante’s feelings. Citing Humphrey Bogart in 1936’s The Petrified Forest as “the first gangster who smoked cigarettes and stayed tough,” he builds broader claims about smoking culture off the screen that the evidence doesn’t support. On the first page of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Faulkner introduces us to a doctor who doesn’t smoke cigarettes or wear pajamas because his father told him both “were for dudes and women.” But that section takes place around 1937, and the doctor is forty-eight, and his father drilled it into his head when he was “sixteen and eighteen and twenty”—in the first decade of the twentieth century. Stateside during the Second World War, writes Paul Fussell, with all the good brands going to the boys overseas, US civilians “learned to roll their own, plying little bags of Bull Durham or operating cigarette-rolling machines, likely to produce unsatisfactory objects—hypertrophied tubes thick as a finger or white sticks resembling toothpicks.” (Fussell means a hand-operated tabletop model for home use: how different than Bonsack’s machine, which by 1884 was capable of rolling 120,000 cigarettes in a single shift.) In his seminal book The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell tells of the company commander who toughed up a timid young soldier by taking him “on an outrageously risky impromptu stroll right out into No Man’s Land, culminating in the swank of smoking cigarettes in a notoriously dangerous Masters of Fire

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willow copse between the lines.” By some point in the First World War, cigarettes have become synonymous with masculinity and daring. The Social History of Smoking was composed near the beginning of the Great War, and so has a chapter on “Smoking by Women,” and more surprisingly, one on “Smoking in Church.” That, though it was not the author’s intention, reminded me that smoking tobacco is a sacred thing. In an interview about his Western Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch describes ceremonial smoking by the movie’s cultural adviser, and says, “For indigenous people here, it’s still a sacrament; it’s what you bring to someone’s house, it’s what you smoke when you pray.” At least one Native American creation myth relates how human beings were formed from tobacco smoke, and I think of the Shaker “smoking meeting” I read about in The Shaker Experience in America, which “united brethren, sisters, and children in billowing smoke as all puffed on their pipes,” in hopes of “feeling Mother’s spirit.” The New World, wrote Infante, was “where smoking was not for gentlemen but for sorcerers.” We should back away slowly from primordial holiness. I’m not qualified to jump into the argument over whether people first tamed fire in what is now China or in what is now Israel (as Kristen J. Gremillion frets in her book on prehistoric dining). I’m not even qualified to write about cigarette lighters. Poore’s history of Zippo has a couple of paragraphs speculating on whether a certain kind of hinge plate was discontinued in 1937 or 1940. It’s probably too late 58

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to inform you that this is not that kind of book. I’ll stick with Ted Ballard’s summary, which I liked best: “Okay, all the temples in the world . . . let’s go back to the caveman days. Cavemen, some old person that couldn’t walk or was crippled, some old woman didn’t have no teeth, she became the keeper of the flame.” It’s true that in the ambitious 1980s caveman movie Quest for Fire, the one caveman with severe male-pattern baldness is in charge of blowing encouragingly on the local ember. “They had to keep the fire going, and you know why?” Mr. Ballard said. “Keep the damn animals from eating you. Okay?” (Another point where Quest for Fire and Ted Ballard agree.) “But later on they become temple dwellers,” he said. “Now, the temple dwellers had one job. Of course, later on they began to store grain. But the main thing: the oil for the lamps. And you went to the temple to get a light. They’d give you a bunch of bullshit, and it goes back to caveman days, said, ‘This’ll serve you, but it’ll eat you.’ They teach the firefighters today, in firefighting school, the same damn thing. You can’t trust a fire. It’s an entity within itself and it’ll turn on you in a heartbeat and it’ll devour you. But every one of these temples that they excavate, they find these little old clay pots, little lamps.” “Do you have any of those?” I asked him. “I did have,” he said. “I ended up selling them. I’ll have to get past you here. I have to get my keys. Keys are a hell of a thing.”

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5  Smoke ’Em If You’ve Got ’Em

Let it suffice to note that anyone in the services who did not smoke cigarettes was looked on as a freak. Paul Fussell, Wartime

“It’s not about man’s worst habit, but his inventions,” Mr.  Ballard said. “The number one way of waging war is fire. A fast burn—I was in demolitions—a fast burn is an explosion. A slow burn is a fire. Once the gun come into being, lighters followed munitions.” He showed me a remarkable assortment of makeshift cigarette lighters created by soldiers of the First World War. “They would make these out of anything,” he said. “These are bicycle caps, they tell me. And they would make these little things out of copper. . . . See, this is a nut off of an automobile or truck or something over there and the guy made a lighter out of it. Big old first wheels were very crude, especially the flint wheels. Very crude, hand-done. And of course there’s

lots of variation to ’em. This is called ‘The Ugly Prince.’ This is the son of Wilhelm. The ugly prince.” The dusty medallion showed a goose-faced, hunched-up weakling. “That’s not a nice likeness!” I cried redundantly. “They were souvenirs for fighting. Now, this one, the French soldier is looking through the keyhole. And this is what he sees on the other side.” Mr. Ballard flipped over the lighter, where a nude woman stood in an open and welcoming attitude. “Lucky him,” I said. All these lighters were about the size and shape of pocket watches. “You’ve got foreign soldiers in foreign places and you’ve got a group of people trying to get their money off of ’em. And so they’re locally done to sell to the GIs. Some of these are real crude. Now this is trench art,” he said, fondly picking up another one. “It’s a souvenir.” “It’s got the word ‘souvenir’ printed on it,” I observed. “Sure! But this is an expansion band around a 37-milimeter bullet. When it fires, this catches in the grooves of the barrel of the rifle and as the bullet is delivered, makes it spin.” “So they weren’t lighters until the soldiers added the wicks and everything?” I asked, unaware at the time of the counterargument that local civilians were as likely to produce the finished lighters as to supply the raw materials. “That’s right. They made ’em from watches and they made ’em from . . .” Mr. Ballard lost his train of thought and started telling me about the history of watch pockets. Even overalls used to have watch pockets, he said. This put him in mind 62

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of “automatics,” lighters that resembled and were worn like pocket watches. “What it is, it opens, and automatically, if it has the flint in it, it’ll spark it and catch on fire. Thorens and several other companies picked up on it and started making automatic lighters.” A 1948 issue of Popular Mechanics shows a novel automatic lighter designed to be worn like a wristwatch. The encyclopedically arranged Cigarette Book situates— maybe too neatly—the invention of the modern cigarette lighter on the battlefields of the First World War: “Two English engineers, Wise and Greenwood, came up with the first design for a compact lighter, prompted by the fact that one of them, Greenwood, had lost an arm in the war and it was impossible to light a cigarette one-handed with matches.” Enforced scrimping on manufacturing materials helped pave the way for a democratization of lighters in the Second World War—the smaller, affordable varieties that soon everyone would carry. So war popularized the cigarette and the pocket cigarette lighter. This is anecdotal (though I did go through about 600 of his famous Second World War cartoons) but Bill Mauldin’s GIs overwhelmingly use matches. There’s a 1943 panel titled “The Last Match” in which a huddled group of soldiers— cigarettes, cigars and a pipe at the ready—are doing their best to protect that precious little stick from the wind. One appears to be praying. I associate Mauldin’s everyman foot soldier with the verbal portraits of Ernie Pyle, who was, as Fussell writes, Smoke ’Em If You’ve Got ’Em

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“the most important interpreter of the war to the American public. . . . Pyle specialized in what his profession called ‘Joe Blow stories’—charming or odd vignettes of home-town boys designed for home-town consumption. . . . And the truth was that most servicemen would rather have had their names appear in one of Pyle’s dispatches than a medal.” “I’m gonna show you an Ernie Pyle lighter. What it was, when he got killed in Okinawa, Blaisdell, the founder of Zippo, had two hundred made, and I think they say, it’s written down there . . . two hundred and twenty.” He showed me a Zippo in a finish called “black crackle,” which looks like it sounds. Pyle himself wrote, “In peacetime they are nickel-plated and shiny. In wartime they are black, with a rough finish.” It seems that Blaisdell did send a shipment of memorial lighters to some of the men with whom Pyle had been embedded, though Pyle’s legend and Zippo’s get swirled in a fog of cross-marketing. By 1961, a Life magazine ad for Zippo is pimping a secret message that Pyle supposedly scratched on the bottom of a Zippo in March of 1945. “It still works today,” the ad boasts of the lighter, which seems distasteful seeing as how Pyle doesn’t, having been felled by machine-gun fire that April. The Zippo unearthed by WALL-E, animation’s great collector, still works postapocalypse. Mr. Ballard brought out some late-nineteenth-century items, a bit like small belt buckles. He popped open a couple and showed me the workings. “During the Civil War they invented a tape primer that would go in a little patch box and 64

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when you pull the hammer back it would stick this little cap and that’s where all the caps in cap toys come from: the Civil War. They put it on this little drum. When it come around, it would hit this little steel pin. It would explode. It’s called mercury fulminate. It’s what’s in the detonator in a bullet, the little part where the firing pin hits, that’s filled with mercury fulminate. Or some people call it fulminate of mercury. These are all different types of cap lighters that would fire. In this particular case you have a little drop hammer. The ignition device came about by way of the Maynard rifle.” I did recognize those rolls of caps, just like the ones spooled in the toy pistols I played with as a boy. “What does that say on the front there?” I asked, and then I read it: “Little Gem. New York.” “Yeah, and this will date to back around the end of the Civil War.” Next Mr. Ballard showed me a long pole. “This is a lamp lighter’s . . . you can call it a cane or whatever. It’s actually a wand that he would use to light the streetlamps. Now, during warfare, I put the wick. . .” He held it away from him rather than up. The tool for safety and light becomes the instrument of death. “This is the same stick they’d fire the cannons with. They didn’t get up there and . . . they want to get out there far away.”

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6  What Have We Learned So Far?

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. MacBeth

Fire is old. Maybe there were some cigarettes in Mexico in 1518, but we’re not counting those. Freud started smoking cigarettes in 1880, the same year Bonsack perfected his fabulous industrial cigarette-rolling machine. Coincidence? Yes. Cigarettes were considered cheap and womanly until men started killing one another while smoking them, then everybody liked them. You could light your cigarette with a huge complicated silver ziggurat sitting on a table, sure. But our cigarette lighters, the people’s cigarette lighters, fit in the people’s pockets. They work in all kinds of ways, using all kinds of

fuels (even perfume) and mechanisms and catalysts. But yours has a little wheel we call a “flint wheel”—it isn’t really flint—and the wheel hits some metal and the metal makes a spark and the spark ignites some fuel and the flame dances on the wick and lights your cigarette and it intimately lights the cigarette of the one you love. Your cigarette lighter represents your soul, so you get drunk and give it away to your pal, or your pal steals it without compunction. Either way, you can’t hang onto it forever. And that’s what a cigarette lighter is.

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7  Strike Anywhere

“Excuse me. Could I borrow a match?” “I use a lighter.” Bond produced his battered Ronson and handed it over. “Better still.” “Until they go wrong.” spy code in From Russia, With Love by Ian Fleming

According to the most recent statistics I could find on the US Fire Administration website, twice as many arson fires are started with matches than with lighters, which nevertheless remain the American arsonist’s second-favorite tool. Lighters get a better shake in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes where, out of seventeen cigarettes lit onscreen, only five are lit by matches. “Falling for you without a second look/Falling out of your open pocketbook/Giving you away like motel matches,” groans Elvis Costello. When ace detective Nick Charles finds Gloria Grahame with a knife in her back, a stray

matchbook from a Poughkeepsie hotel helps him track the missing clarinetist she loved. Matchbooks used to be another disposable collectible or collectible disposable, another good clue. It’s a plot point so ingrained that we used it on Adventure Time, the kids’ cartoon I work on. Matchbooks advertising cocktail lounges and roadhouses and inns are still collectible in the traditional way. That is, an adulterer can forgetfully stick one in a trench coat pocket and fly home. But just one: the TSA allows a single book of safety matches  per passenger, and “common lighters” (they  use what looks like a Bic to illustrate the concept on their website) in carry-on luggage. I almost snagged a matchbook from Junior’s, an Oklahoma City steakhouse that seems to be benignly stuck in the 1980s. I went there the night before I met Ted Ballard. But I wasn’t sure whether they’d let me take a book of matches on an airplane, which is probably why Junior’s had a glass of ballpoint pens—hardly as romantic— next to the bowl of matchbooks. A war correspondent subbing for Walter Winchell’s column in June of 1943 claims that matchbooks from the Stork Club went over big in Tunisia, “where the stork is considered a bird of favorable omen . . . valuable articles of barter in our dealings with the Senssui, Taureg and Berber sheiks. The rate of exchange was one book of matches for one egg, one book of matches for one scrawny chicken.” In Raising Arizona, a match is disrespectfully scratched across a pristine surface, leaving an ominous sign of the lowest villainy. Duke, the hothead in Stalag 17, all volatility 70

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in contrast to William Holden’s slick self-sufficiency, realizes Holden is a hero after all, in his own way. In macho vindication, Holden strikes a match on Duke’s scruffy cheek. Duke, practically glowing at the attention, puts his hand there as if he’s been kissed, a standout moment in a film brimming with homoerotic tension. With the coming of the cheaper nineteenth-century friction matches, “the ancient bonds of fire tending and codes of fire-related behavior disappeared into pants pockets,” pouts fire historian Stephen J. Pyne. “Anyone could call it forth.” A friend tells me that a cigar should always be lit with a match but a joint should always be lit with a lighter. Other cigar smokers of my acquaintance prefer butane. As one cigar guidebook kind of hilariously puts it, “Never choose a kerosene lighter or a cardboard match impregnated with chemicals, for they will despoil the treasure.” Local novelist and cigar smoker Tom Franklin claims that there is, in fact, a pleasant aroma he associates with a butane lighter—we talked about it until he began to doubt his own senses. “Tom must have a better sense of smell than me,” says another local novelist and cigar smoker, Ace Atkins. “I say they are completely odorless.” Mr. Ballard said, “Now, the cigars used to be packed in a box and it’d have a thin sheet of cedar over the top. They would soak it, put it in there, and close it up. It’d keep the moisture in. So if you took that sheet and just rolled it in your hand it’d come apart in little spears as long as the sheet is. And Strike Anywhere

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of course they would be grooved or something to make ’em break up easy, but the point is, there’s books on the etiquette of smoking, and you do not light a cigar from a match. The sulfur contaminates it. You take a cedar or a lemon stick and you light your smoke.” Matches no longer stink so much of brimstone, of course, and another cigar guide recommends “special long slow-burning matches” from “high quality shops such as Dunhill . . . but a normal wooden match will do perfectly well.” Matches and lighters weren’t always enemies. In fact, I thought I might have been inventing the rivalry as I went along, until I ran across a 1911 newspaper story about French authorities tossing citizens in jail for using “the famous pocket cigarette lighters” made in Belgium, thereby jeopardizing the French government’s match monopoly. A tax on lighters was found to be a more practical solution than imprisonment, with extra punitive fees for lighters exhibiting “rich, artistic patterns in silver or gold.” But a photo in The Legend of the Lighter shows a clever nineteenth-century tinderbox with a compartment for sulfur matches built in. You pull the cord to send the steel wheel whipping against another piece of steel. The sparks light the tinder and the tinder lights the match and the match lights God knows what. Early matches needed to be lit by another source. On a coffee-spattered scrap of paper I have noted the lighter brandished threateningly in Identity Thief and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, each an encyclopedic repository of 72

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winkingly regurgitated film clichés. Filmmakers see matches differently. Lighters are Jerry Bruckheimer. Matches are David Lynch. A lighter is a threat. A match is a promise. A match has a death wish. A lighter wants to live to fight another day. Maybe crazy Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs would have put his lighter to murderous use, but we’ll never know because he got gunned down before he ever had the chance. (My friend Kent Osborne told me it’s a lighter, not a match, and I believe him. I didn’t feel like watching Reservoir Dogs again. I know this can cause trouble. Not to claim that the present volume isn’t riddled with inaccuracies, but in his biography of Henry Ford, on which I rely for the next chapter, even the much-garlanded history whiz Douglas Brinkley completely screws up the plot of Chaplin’s The Circus. I don’t think he watched it. The dazzling Infante botches his retelling of the lighting of an imaginary cigarette in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. But Infante swims in a fantasia of memory and dream and also he died, so I give him a pass. I re-watched every single movie mentioned in this book—usually all of it, occasionally just the relevant scenes—except for Reservoir Dogs. Oh, and as of this writing, there’s a constantly airing trailer for something I haven’t seen called Kingsman, which the jerk who pitched it to the studio probably described as “James Bond meets Harry Potter.” Colin Firth tells a young spy recruit that his cigarette lighter is really a hand grenade— how much gentler Simon and Garfunkel’s “his bowtie is really a camera”—and there it goes whizzing through the air Strike Anywhere

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in slow motion with a fireball behind it, just like an action hero, the cigarette lighter so integral to the platonic ideal of the action movie that it gets as much screen time in the trailer as Samuel L. Jackson.) The exhaustingly self-referential Last Action Hero stylizes the lighter to the point of symbol. In a sick in-joke, the filmmakers cast Laurence Olivier’s widow Joan Plowright as a schoolteacher showing a clip of Olivier’s Hamlet to a bunch of disrespectful little snots. “You may remember him from the Polaroid commercials,” Plowright is forced to say about her dead husband. The clip segues into a fantasy sequence of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet. “Hey, Claudius,” he says, pausing to light his cigar. “You killed my fadda. Big mistake.” And he sends Claudius flying through a stained glass window to his death, before mowing down Polonius with a machine gun. It’s very tongue-in-cheek. (“You know how they bury time capsules, for future generations?” Cameron Crowe asks Billy Wilder. “I think TriStar recently sent a capsule into outer space with a copy of The Last Action Hero.” Wilder snaps back, “To see what lousy pictures they could make?”) “To be or not to be,” says Schwarzenegger. He opens the lid of his lighter, which makes the satisfying metal-on-metal sound of a dagger being drawn from its sheath. “Not to be.” Everything blows up. There’s no causation. The lighter is a magical totem of destruction. Michael Almereyda, in his 2000 film version of Hamlet, plays with some of the same themes when he sets the soliloquy in the action section of a video store. 74

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Schwarzenegger uses his lighter as a kind of comma throughout Last Action Hero. It’s good punctuation. Maybe it’s an ellipsis. Steve Coogan uses a lighter in almost literally that way in Coffee and Cigarettes, tapping it on a table in three sharp dots as he pauses, trying to think up an excuse, or a lie. In Blood Simple, the sleazy bar owner makes vague threats to the even sleazier PI, regaling him with tales of old Greece, when the ruler would decapitate the bearer of bad news. The PI gets up to leave. His lighter is still on the desk between them. He says, “Give me a call whenever you want to cut off my head” (he picks up the lighter, a heavy beat) “I can always crawl around without it.” Bruce Willis crawls, sheathed in shadow, along a dark air duct in Die Hard, evading bad guys with machine guns. He pauses. His lighter (scavenged off a dead baddie) flares, illuminating his face. He makes a sarcastic crack. The lighter goes off. It’s dark again. Lighter as italics? I happened to catch the ever-wily Veronica Mars, in her eponymous movie, using her lighter to set off the sprinklers in a building—a familiar diversion to buy the action hero some time. Rob Thomas, creator of the show and director of the film, told me via email that he “unsuccessfully scoured” his brain and couldn’t think of where he’d seen it before, though he felt sure he had. It’s not Die Hard, about 6,000 selfrighteous Google purists “calling out” Bruce Willis to the contrary (I had to re-watch Die Hard twice in a row, thanks to them. Were they thinking of one of the sequels? I don’t care anymore). Thomas related “a funny exchange between Strike Anywhere

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visual effects guys and special effects guys on the day we were shooting it, with one guy telling me that this absolutely wouldn’t work like this in ‘real life’ and the other guy insisting it would, ‘depending on the age of the system.’ ” “Keanu Reeves does it in Constantine,” Adventure Time supervising producer Adam Muto reminded me. (“Hey, buddy, you got a light?” asks a demon made of cockroaches. Reeves does some all-time champion lighter acting in the movie, snapping his lighter around like a vaudeville cowboy holstering his pistol. By coincidence, one competitor for the trophy is the actor Eddie Constantine in Alphaville. “Godard called Alphaville ‘a film about light,’ ” notes Richard Brody. It’s also a film about a lighter.) But Thomas’s first advisor may be right. When I look for news on the subject, the major item to present itself is an article from The Weekly World News—the fabulist tabloid that gave us Bat Boy—about a man who puts his lighter under a sprinkler during a production of La Bohème and drenches “three thousand opera fans with voluminous sprays of water.” The headline is pretty good: “Man Shouts ‘Rain’ in Crowded Theater.” The novelist Lee Durkee speculated in a bar one night that lighters have feminine qualities and matches masculine: the quick ignition and immediate consummation of the match, the patient attention required, on the other hand, to stimulate the lighter. . . . Lee demonstrated by way of pantomime a gesture that is, as I would learn from The Legend of the Lighter, called “the ‘la chute de pouce’ (fall-of-the-thumb) 76

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system,” with accompanying illustration of a “Stick gas and flint wheel disposable lighter by Feudor, France, 1964. Plastic and gilded aluminum.” French gilded aluminum! Everything about it screams romance. The Feudor looks like a Bic, but rounder, with a smoky color–like lipstick. If you expected to find between these covers a clear chronology and explication of lighter technologies accompanied by lush and intriguing color photographs, I nudge you in the direction of The Legend of the Lighter. Not that I didn’t do my homework. Imagine the scholarly shiver I felt when I found a 1931 newspaper from Moravia, Iowa, in which it was announced that someone named Clyde Fuert (!) had won a prize at a “Home Declamatory Contest” by reciting the theatrical monologue Uncle Hezekiah’s CigaretteLighter. There, buried in the heartland, a time capsule sure to overflow with revealing societal attitudes. I only got more jazzed up when it became clear that there were as few as three physical copies of Uncle Hezekiah’s Cigarette-Lighter scattered around the United States, possibly the world. A rarity, a treasure! A dismal foray into rustic dialect humor! It did, though, set the match against the lighter, providing a little more grist in that department. The match: rough, manly, and efficient. (“From a vest pocket he takes a match, stands up, rubs the match vigorously down his leg, and the match lights.”) Yes, it goes vigorously down his leg. As for the lighter, “There is a spark but no flame.” Covered “with genyoowine horsehide,” this unreliable store-bought trinket reminds us of the misogynistic crack the ersatz Faulkner Strike Anywhere

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makes about his sense of smell in Barton Fink: “Well, my olfactory’s turning womanish on me, lying and deceitful.” The lighter salesman, in Uncle Hezekiah’s considered opinion, is “one of these here slick doo-dad clerks, just a young feller. Heh! heh! heh!—I gotta laugh every time I think of ’im. All collar an’ tie an’ suit, an’ not much man!” It’s far from the first time we’ve seen it insinuated that there’s a masculine approach and a less-than-masculine approach to tobacco and fire, tied to other binaries: the roughhewn country versus the pampered city, butch America versus fey Europe (the lighter is “imported”). As a matter of fact, Uncle Hezekiah prefers “ter chaw me some chawin’ terbaccy.” Oh, and a corncob pipe when he deigns to smoke. It is with a combination of pathetic desire to squeeze something out of the hours I put into finding a copy of Uncle Hezekiah’s Cigarette-Lighter and morbid amazement at the sheer volume of grating folksiness that I perhaps linger too morbidly over our plainspoken yokel and his neurotic fixation on his cigarette lighter. It may be more fruitful to compare two more readily accessible works of art, the sordid precode melodrama Three on a Match and Roald Dahl’s 1948 short story “Man from the South,” the latter filmed a number of times, first and most famously as a 1960 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Especially in the original, printed version, Dahl’s lighter is a personification of cheerful American technological utopian hubris. “ ‘It never fails,’ he said, smiling now because he was purposely exaggerating his little boast. ‘I promise you 78

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it never fails.’ ” Significantly, he is a US Naval cadet. Youth versus age, New World versus Old, the lighter doubter, no North American, possessing “very small, uneven teeth, slightly tarnished.” Our golden hometown boy is “barebodied except for a pair of faded brown bathing shorts.” The cadet’s gee-whiz vocabulary scrapes against the caricatured dialect that Dahl puts in the strange little man’s “slightly tarnished” mouth: “Dat is de bet. But I tink you are afraid.” America is Eden, and this Old World serpent (Peter Lorre in the small-screen iteration, perfectly cast on paper but sadly slow and bloated by now) knows the apple to use: a “sleek pale-green Cadillac.” By moving the action to Las Vegas (represented by a quick, stock-footage establishing shot) from Jamaica, the TV version saves on production costs and takes the imperialist edge off the story. The main conflict becomes youth versus age—present, as I mentioned, in the story (not to mention in Uncle Hezekiah’s Cigarette-Lighter; please, let’s not mention it), but predominant in the teleplay. Peter Lorre calls Steve McQueen “very young,” and taunts him into the bet by ruminating over magazine articles he’s read about how “the young generation grows soft and the starch is leaving their spine.” (Young George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, another all-American optimist, gambles on a lighter, too.) But McQueen’s character is slick, sharp, and cool, a gambling man, even if he sweats a little in the lead-up to the climax. It’s no surprise that he doesn’t say, “Jumping jeepers!” like the boy in the short story when presented with the wager. Strike Anywhere

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He’s Steve McQueen. Nobody’s going to chop off Steve McQueen’s finger, not even Peter Lorre. (That’s the famous bet, of course: either McQueen’s lighter works ten times in a row or Peter Lorre gets to take his little finger home.) The lighter ratchets up pleasurable suspense, but no real danger, with every flick. Meanwhile, Hans Christian Andersen’s “Poor Little Match Girl” drops dead. Lighters play around. Matches don’t. A fire required delicate handling in the trenches of the First World War. Paul Fussell’s detailed description of life in the trenches includes the fact that “bacon was fried in messtin lids over small, and if possible smokeless, fires.” As Ted Ballard put it to me, explaining why three people using the same match was considered back luck: “The third one, well, he gets his damn brains blowed out.” “That is bad luck,” I said. Curiously, then, though Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory has an entire section on the mystical significance of the number 3 in the First World War, Fussell doesn’t address the superstition. We have to wait for Wartime, his book on the Second World War, before the glow of cigarettes and their lighters becomes enmeshed in the folklore of paranoia. Fear of ingenious codes and signals means that anyone “igniting a cigarette on deck is likely to be suspected of disloyalty rather than stupidity.” A British diarist blames the errant bombing of a country estate on the soldiers billeted there: “By day they sat on the green carelessly dismembering their Bren guns; by night their lighted cigarettes defeated the black-out.” 80

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Mr. Ballard had a “Foxhole Blackout” lighter still in the box, guaranteed not to flame or flicker. Che Guevera’s guerilla fighting manual, as Infante tells us, “recommended the pipe as the ideal smoking artifact once upon a war: it was easy to carry, easy to smoke and easy to conceal and hard to detect by the enemy.” Guevera switched to cigars only when he got to Cuba and discovered that pipes were considered feminine and “gringo.” Match superstition is scoffed at by dark-haired Ann Dvorak, and just look what happens. She starts Three on a Match with everything and ends it in a lurid nightmare, throwing herself out a window wearing a message in lipstick she’s scrawled across herself. Spectacular suicide is the only way she can save her tow-headed son from low men. Meanwhile, in a cozier locale, the two perfectly modbobbed early-1930s platinum blondes, Joan Blondell and Bette Davis, enjoy their cigarettes. Blondell tosses the match but misses the fireplace. Her match curls and blackens on the floor, the film’s last image, one of finality, the opposite of the lighter’s false promise. When George Bailey gets that drugstore lighter to spark in It’s a Wonderful Life (“I wish I had a million dollars! Hot dog!”), it’s a childish faith in omens and rituals that darkens as adulthood and reality close in. Likewise, it begins to dawn on the boy in “Man from the South” that reliability is an illusion and ideals will falter. Quentin Tarantino pushes that realization hard in the giddy final seconds of Four Rooms, turning the entire mechanism of suspense inside out when, in a fast-motion replay of Dahl’s Strike Anywhere

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gamble, the lighter falters immediately and the pinky comes off in one blithe stroke. In a nice, if less radical, touch added to the story for Hitchcock’s show, McQueen, in the aftermath of his close call, tries to light the cigarette of a lovely admirer. But now that he’s free from the threat of Lorre’s butcher knife, his shiny ninety-nine-cent lighter doesn’t work. Or is that “less radical”? By undermining the suave move of every romantic movie hero, the Hitchcock show may be reminding us what that gesture means: “Hey, look, my penis is working.” What fear does Peter Lorre’s butcher knife instigate but one of castration? What does age envy youth? What does youth fear from age? George Bailey’s childish wish on the lighter for a million dollars turns ashy and bitter later in his film, when a lack of money keeps him from fulfilling his patriarchal role. Uncle Hezekiah is confused by his attraction to something a foppish young man offers him in the city, and he can’t get it to work when he gets back home. Richard Pryor’s Bic failed to light twice before he successfully set himself on fire. There is no eternal recurrence. This is what the match already knows. Lighters are Nietzsche. Matches are Marcus Aurelius.

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8  In Cars

Hollywood starlets stood on the perimeter, but I could tell they wanted nothing more than to grab me by the arm and tell me how they wanted their mansions out in California completely covered in car cigarette lighters, or at least the shiny silver ones found in 1960s models. George Singleton’s narrator recounting a dream in “No Shade Ever”

Cigarettes, cars, and sex are hard to separate. “Everyone knows the story of the 1934 Fiat Balilla advertisement featuring the lady whose skirt showed too much,” asserts with charming if misplaced confidence a coffee-table book called Cars of the Thirties and Forties, which reads in spots as if it were written by Bertie Wooster (“Euphoria led inevitably to sex. Fairly antiseptic sex, be it said”). The lady in question is smoking a cigarette, it should probably go without saying. An Automobile Manufacturers of America publication from 1961 mentions the “cigar lighter” (see below) appearing

as a common accessory in 1925, along with “locking radiator caps,” mirrors and ashtrays. “For the first time, more closed than open models were sold,” the passage concludes, calling forth an image of flappers and their beaus packed tight in roaring, smoke-filled boxes. And running over people, I guess, like in The Great Gatsby. (“I just got back a bunch of lighters from Australia. I furnished lighters two or three times for them people,” said Mr. Ballard, referring to the Baz Luhrmann adaptation, sweetly misidentifying Leonardo DiCaprio as “Brad Pits.”) Casco, the primary early manufacturer of automotive cigarette lighters, also made an “electric massager” in the 1950s, the era when their improved, cordless lighter became the standard model in US cars. The Connecticut Museum of History, which has one, emphasizes the massager’s “bright turquoise naugahyde . . . 8-way control and other advanced features,” but given the extremely relaxed woman on the packaging, it’s hard not recall Peggy’s brief encounter with the “passive exercise” gadget on Mad Men. There’s not a lot of literature on the history of cigarette lighters in cars. Not even the editor of Antique Automobile Magazine could think of any significant writing on the subject, though he confirmed that they first appeared in the mid-twenties and gave me the vivid detail that the originals were on cords that “sometimes reached all the way to the backseat.” Not only does this sound dangerous, but it would have precluded the automotive lighter’s crowning cinematic appearance, tossed from the window in surly protest by John 84

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Belushi when his brother picks him up from the state pen in a converted cop cruiser. I happened to pick up George Singleton’s story collection Between Wrecks, which provides the epigraph for this chapter, and was thrilled beyond reason that the narrator of the first story has a vision “of chairs and beds adorned entirely with ancient car cigarette lighters.” Later, someone will suggest that he line a casket with them. “It would be cushiony,” muses the narrator. In the book’s closing novella, a terrible standup comedian tells a joke about a car cigarette lighter that walks into a bar and says, “Don’t push me.” Material is so skimpy that I regretted mentioning car cigarette lighters in earlier chapters and not saving them for this space. And there’s another problem. An Internet commenter going by the pseudonym Haze might as well be addressing me directly when he adds his two cents to an article: “This is pedantic I know, but the thing that you are talking about is a cigar lighter. If you smoke cigars, the difference is sort of important and few car companies used actual cigarette lighters.” Haze points us in the direction of 1960s Alfa Romeos, which did. A mind-numbing search of dozens of online Alfa Romeo chat forums led me to the “Brico Pram” brand lighter, which was installed in Alfa Romeos, Fiats, and Ferraris, at least. I even found a demonstration on YouTube. Rather than the button appended to a pop-out lighter, there’s a hole, as if your lighter has caved in. It looks like a magic trick. You stick the cigarette in the convenient hole and press the ring In Cars

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around it. Moments later, smoke rises gently from a vent. A little click and your cigarette twitches, indicating that it’s ready. Remove it from the hole and it’s already going. You have a head start. “Much safer than a cigar lighter, which required you to put a big orange glowing circle in front of your face while driving,” concludes our friend Haze. Safety is the concern, too, of the marketing team behind the Wico brand adapter (an allusion to or rip-off of the Brico name?), which was available to stick into your cigar lighter receptacle, shrinking it to proper cigarette size for a mere $2.95. The ad copy memorably promises to save the driver from a “horrible accident” and adds the unwelcome reassurance, already noted, that not only will the Wico brand adapter light your cigarette, it’ll “take the first few puffs.” What potential consumers—even those not in favor of horrible accidents—want to think their cigarette lighter is a mooch? Despite Haze’s caveat, even a few of the old corded model lighters from the auto’s early days were made for cigarettes. A British company called Delarelle (their product comes in “Mottled Brown”—a strange selling point!) promises to light your cigarette with just “3 amps” of power, “as against 16 to 20 amps as consumed by other lighters.” Delarelle proclaims itself “the only lighter which can be fitted to a motor cycle [sic].” In his massive brick on Henry Ford and his motor company, historian Douglas Brinkley finds a number of 86

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occasions to reflect on the position of Henry and Clara Ford as “the nation’s most vocal opponents of tobacco,” but doesn’t spare a single word for lighters, or how the Fords’ mania might have affected their inclusion in cars. We do get a funny picture of son Edsel lighting up “in the lounge off his office” just to piss off Mom and Dad—the only employee of Ford allowed to smoke. In the historical fantasy Bright Leaf, the inventor of the cigarette-rolling machine decamps to Detroit to get in on the ground floor of the automobile industry. Mr. Ballard compared his platinum wire lighters to catalytic converters. Cars were often on his mind, and though he never talked about automotive cigarette lighters, he repeatedly connected the two technologies. “The first headlights was carbide,” he said, “and they had the little chargers settin’ on the fenders but they have to be cleaned every time they’re used and it’s a heck of a job.” He connected these with what he called “smoker’s lamps” that “would burn off a sewer gas, or carbide. This went in a pub, screwed to a table as you can see. The little wick burned and it furnished a light in a dark pub but it also . . . every pub in the world was a smoking pub. They brought you a tray of pipes and you’d break the end off of it and throw it down and smoke a pipe if you were afraid of Ebola.” (Here, he was being purposely anachronistic and topical, and we shared a laugh.) “But I’ve got enough of this stuff. They say I’ve got one of the largest collections in the world. But I don’t claim that. I’ve never seen all the others. Now! What happened. Let me tell you the sad part. These antique dealers, these fuckers that In Cars

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think they know everything, they ruined the smoker’s lamp, they call ’em a writer’s lamp.” Mr. Ballard changed his voice, started talking like a snooty expert: “ ‘Everybody had to have a flame to put a rosin to seal the letter. And you put your ring in it if you were in the 1500s. In later years you would seal it and put a mark on that rosin and it was a done document.’ They didn’t know what they was talking about. More people smoked than wrote.” He showed me a large, shiny tube. “When I was demonstrating this I’d put this lid on. I’d put this lid on and then I’d hit it. You know what’d happen? It blows up. The first diesel engines ever made used the same ignition. This is compression. That goes back literally hundreds of years. They made a tube, a wooden tube, and they would take and push the plunger in it and it would cause the fire to break out. It’s a great one to demonstrate to kids.” “Oh, kids like fire,” I heard myself agreeing. Mr. Ballard activated an old lighter he said was from the 1890s. It made a noise like Frankenstein’s lab equipment. “This is called a jump spark,” he said. “And the funny thing about it, the thing that’s the most interesting, this is like you would take two electric wires and pop ’em together and try to make the flash set the grass on fire, which, as you well know, it will, in some cases. When Ford needed a spark coil for his Model T it was already used, his ignition, it was already being used in these contraptions.” Model Ts ran off of something called a “buzz box,” my dad—who has worked on cars almost all his life—later told me, confirming what Mr. Ballard had 88

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said. “It put out a continuous spark, like a little lightning bolt between two points all the time,” Dad said. Automotive lighters have always worked off of the car’s electrical system. Our Saturn, purchased new in late 1996 and still running as of this writing, still has a cute little cigarette icon on the lighter button, though our ashtrays are full of sticky spare change and we use the cavity to charge up our junk like everybody else. Cars are not the only space from which lighters are vanishing. Over a lunch of fried chicken, Tom Franklin said he’d tell me a sad story. At a recent Styx reunion concert (“It’s already sad,” he interrupted himself) the band asked the audience “to wave their phones in the air the way they used to wave their lighters.” Tom defiantly waved his lighter. The Danish artist Rose Eken exhibited “a forensic assortment of hand-painted ceramics” in the shape of “objects one might find in a punk venue . . . a personalized memorial to NYC’s dwindling lawless zones and the mayhem they contained,” arranged for display on the floor as if found during an archeological dig. Among Eken’s fossils are about half a dozen exquisite, misshapen, crude and colorful Bics.

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9  Strange Intimacy

I dipped my cookie and the shit blew up. Richard Pryor

“How hot are you?” says Richard Conte to the tough guy standing in his office. Conte is playing one of The Brothers Rico in the film of that name, a last gasp of the original noir tradition. He’s the good Rico. He was connected, but now he’s straight. He owns an industrial laundry where he’s getting himself clean, see? But sometimes the old bosses will call him up in the dead of night and ask him a favor. Give him an order, really. This time he’s supposed to provide a place for a guy on the lam to cool off—ironically, Conte assigns him to the boiler room. This guy is obvious trouble. He’s ungentlemanly to the secretary, for example. So Richard Conte wants to know exactly what he’s getting into. And that’s why he says, “How hot are you?” The tough guy has been warned not to talk about his situation to anybody. So he keeps his mush shut. He just flips

open his lighter and keeps it open at a weird angle, pointing it at Conte, and the flame grows and grows until it’s an ominous, hissing finger. He’s real hot. In a genre practically defined by shadows and cigarette smoke—all those loners coming back damaged from the war (war again), reaching for the nearest consolation—it’s natural that lighters play a key role. Before the title of the quintessential film noir The Big Sleep even appears, the silhouette of Humphrey Bogart puts his lighter to the cigarette of the silhouette of Lauren Bacall. A ubiquitous lighter gives Alphaville its noir bona fides. When M. Emmett Walsh breaks into the house in the neonoir Blood Simple, and goes through Frances McDormand’s purse, finding the revolver there, his lighter gives magical illumination, artificial movie light, to the gun’s chambers, half of them empty (or half full, depending on your attitude). In  movies, lighters excel at expressionistic effects. The doomed escapees at the beginning of Stalag 17 impossibly illuminate a whole homemade tunnel with one. What’s sinister in The Brothers Rico becomes antic elsewhere. Tom Franklin has a memory from childhood of seeing Jerry Lewis on The Mike Douglas Show, he thinks, going to light a cigarette only to have a wildly long and terrifying flame come leaping out, like those snakes that spring from peanut cans. In Groundhog Day, when Bill Murray has his epiphany and starts using his purgatorial time-warp to become a 92

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better man, he learns to play the piano, helps strangers in need, and saves lives. He also whips out his lighter at the precise moment a woman lifts a cigarette to her mouth. This is gallantry in Hollywood shorthand. It becomes stylized, exaggerated and ridiculed. In Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie, Anne Bancroft’s cigarette is lit by four ardent admirers at once, the combined power of their lighters incinerating her cigarette to a worthless stub. Agent Scully of The X-Files, uncharacteristically flirty after a shot of governmentconspiracy goof juice, removes a proffered cigarette from the pack with her teeth, and her request for a light is answered by a phalanx of lighters from the admirers crowded around. It’s played for laughs, as the gag perhaps always was, even at its most sincere. If Jerry Lewis’s leaping flame is unbridled id, what must be the Freudian take on the clown’s cigarette snapped in an overeager maw? A cigarette is mangled by a lighter that way in Lewis’s directorial debut The Bellboy, and the gag comes to be closely associated with him, showing up, for example, in SCTV’s Lewis/Ingmar Bergman mash-up “Scenes from an Idiot’s Marriage.” The thing meant to serve and enable instead disfigures and destroys its object: like the atomic bomb and civilization. Too much? In the surreal antiwar masterpiece Duck Soup, Harpo lights a cigar with a blowtorch. As Twain biographer Justin Kaplan observes of Hank Morgan, “The apparatus of enlightenment and progress introduced by the Yankee is indeed a ‘weapon’ which destroys its masters as well as its enemies.” Strange Intimacy

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From boyhood, Buster Keaton was a tinkerer and inventor. David Robinson writes admiringly of Keaton’s “kinship with objects . . . his ability to invest the things about him with distinct life and personality.” Kaplan writes of Twain’s “tendency to humanize machines (and mechanize people).” It’s a pat convention to set up Chaplin and Keaton as opposites. But it’s impossible not to think of Chaplin being devoured by gears in Modern Times while Keaton— by contrast—effectively becomes one with the locomotive in The General. Modern comedy is an attempt to come to a truce with the machine. The angelic Stan Laurel, always an exception, bypasses machinery and goes straight for the elements. Peter Sellers, who based his Oscar-nominated performance on Laurel, walks on water at the end of Being There, a kind of epiphanic summing up of Laurel’s persona and influence. In Way Out West, Laurel’s hand works as a lighter. From his closed palm he flicks out his thumb; there’s a flame at the end of it. In a typically deft touch, it sometimes takes him more than one flick to get a light. Another comic who becomes a lighter is Richard Pryor. In his harrowing, revisionist and beautifully funny retelling in the concert film Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, “one old drunk” holds out his cigarette as Pryor runs through the streets of Los Angeles on fire: “Hey, buddy, can we get a light?” “A terrible act of improvisation,” Pryor biographer Scott Saul calls the suicidal event—not the freebasing accident, 94

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coyly compared to spilled milk and cookies, that Pryor puts forth in his movie. “Do the Mudbone routine!” a voice cries. Pryor laughs, marveling. People only want the greatest hits. He grudgingly slips into character, after insisting that this will be Mudbone’s final appearance anywhere. Then he pulls up a stool and becomes the old wino from Tupelo, Mississippi. We’re nearing the end of the show, and Pryor uses Mudbone, of all devices, to bring up the most personal and unspoken subject of the night. “That fire got on his ass,” Mudbone says of Pryor, and the crowd erupts. Then Pryor tells the story as himself. Afterward he asks a guy in the audience, “You got a light?” The crowd is thrilled and terrified. “Don’t do it!” they yell. “Watch out,” Pryor says before striking the match. Jerry Lewis said, “That’s what comedy is: a man in trouble.” That’s what noir is, too, of course. Or a woman in trouble, though Raw Deal is one of the few pictures from the classic noir era in which a woman is given the voice-over narration we’ve come to identify with the genre. Raymond Burr, reliable noir heavy, burns a henchman’s ear for a laugh, using his omnipresent cigarette lighter, early in Act One of Raw Deal. “Chekhovian?” I wrote in big letters in my little notebook. When Chekhov lover David Mamet has Lindsay Crouse find a gun in the drawer where she’s absently searching for a lighter in the first act of House of Games, you’d better believe it’s going to go off in the third. Strange Intimacy

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Burr’s lighter is beside him on a restaurant table as he tells another henchman, “Someday I’m going to figure out something for you. Something very special, and very funny.” He doesn’t mean it in a nice way. A waiter comes out with Raymond Burr’s special birthday dessert. Burr tastes it and asks for a few more drops of Courvoisier. Then he uses his lighter to set it aflame. Is it cherries jubilee? Whatever it is, he gets irritated and throws it on his moll. Still waiting for that Act Three payoff, where the lighter becomes his downfall. Burr, captured at his most epicene, is constantly jiggling that lighter in his palm. He lights some candles with it just before the antihero comes in and gives him a tussle that sets the curtains of Burr’s lavish penthouse hideout afire. Soon enough Burr is pushed out of a flaming window, so there are at least two intermediaries between him and the lighter that should have killed him more directly. “Some people seem to think that they can get cancer just by looking at our lighters.” Ted Ballard said that in Out West magazine. In his book-length essay on the film Dead Man, Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that much of the comedy in that period film comes from Johnny Depp’s repeated, and very modernsounding, insistence that he doesn’t smoke. He’s unconsciously rejecting the chance at sacramental bonding being offered by his Native American companion. Rosenbaum writes that “contemporary American Puritanism—which treats smoking as something far worse than a health hazard to both the smoker and others, apparently because it affords pleasure to the smoker—is founded on a litany of denial that becomes 96

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enacted and re-enacted by this recurring exchange.” Ross McElwee talks about the “strange intimacy” of being with other smokers, the somehow attractive process of taking their dangerous smoke “into your own bloodstream.” “They say you’ve become a very dangerous man,” remarks conniving tobacco heiress Patricia Neal to cigarette baron Gary Cooper in Bright Leaf, employing zero health-related irony. It’s worth noting that Neal was later married to Roald Dahl, the author, as we have seen, of the world’s most famous cigarette lighter short story.

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10  About These Little Things

“Now look at this. Here’s another. It’s not all that valuable. Probably from 1500, but the point is, this here held alcohol  .  .  .  spirits. I  come from a long line of bootleggers and whiskey makers. Remember, at the lower temperature the fumes that comes off of alcohol is the highest octane. Now, what happens is all of that goes as medicinal. The first run is medicinal. But what’s his name, uh, the writer down in Florida, bearded, Hemingway used to laugh about putting— not cognac—but some of the higher alcohol contents in his lighter.” I told Mr. Ballard I had to go. “And you ain’t seen nothing,” he said. “What you see is about half of my collection, and if that ain’t enough, lookee here. It’s taken me years to figure out different ways of handling this stuff. And even this museum, these displays don’t look like much. And all of this will belong to somebody else. And before I die . . . I’ve gotta get rid of it so I can die in peace. My whole purpose was to promote lighter collecting.

It’s not about me, it’s about these little things. If you was marooned on an island that you knew damn well you wasn’t gonna see nobody, would you want a gun or would you want a lighter? Huh? Huh?” I said I had to go.

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Acknowledgments

F

or their help with this book, I acknowledge Megan Abbott, Patti Abbott, Joey Lauren Adams, Eric Allison, Ace Atkins, Ted Ballard, Jennifer Betts, Ian Bogost, Bill Boyle, Susan Clements, Dan Conaway, Lee Durkee, Dan Etheridge, Tom Franklin, Michelle Garey, Christopher Geissler, Melissa Ginsburg, Anya Groner, Kelly Hogan, Lisa Howorth, Nat Jacks, Laura Lippman, Semmes Luckett, Jeff McNeil, Adam Muto, Haaris Naqvi, Sara Olsen, Kent Osborne, Freddie Pendarvis, Jacqueline Pendarvis, Will Pendarvis, West Peterson, Craig Pittman, Christopher Schaberg, C. B. H. P. Small, David Small, Brendan Steffen, David Swider, Rob Thomas, Wright Thompson, Brian Vilim, Monika Woods, and I really truly acknowledge Theresa Starkey. Everybody else can go to hell.

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Filmography

2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Writ. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. MGM, 1968. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Writ. Robert Getchell. Warner Brothers, 1974. Alphaville. Dir. And Writ. Jean-Luc Godard. Pathe, 1965. Army of Darkness. Dir. Sam Raimi. Writ. Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi. Universal, 1993. Backdraft. Dir. Ron Howard. Writ. Gregory Widen. Universal, 1991. The Bad News Bears. Dir. Michael Ritchie. Writ. Bill Lancaster. Paramount, 1976. Barton Fink. Dir. Joel Coen. Writ. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. 20th Century Fox, 1991. Being There. Dir. Hal Ashby. Writ. Jerzy Kosinski, from his novel. United Artists, 1979. The Bellboy. Dir. and Writ. Jerry Lewis. Paramount, 1960. Big Night. Dir. Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott. Writ. Joseph Tropiano and Stanley Tucci. Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1996. The Big Sleep. Dir. Howard Hawks. Writ. William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, from the novel by Raymond Chandler. Warner Brothers, 1946. The Blues Brothers. Dir. John Landis. Writ. Dan Aykroyd and John Landis. Universal, 1980. Boardwalk Empire. Creat. Terence Winter. HBO, 2010–14.

Bright Leaf. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Writ. Ranald MacDougall, from the novel by Foster Fitzsimmons. Warner Brothers, 1950. Bright Leaves. Dir. and Writ. Ross McElwee. First Run Features, 2003. The Brothers Rico. Dir. Phil Karlson. Writ. Lewis Meltzer, Ben Perry and Dalton Trumbo, from a story by Georges Simenon. Columbia, 1957. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. Dir. Robert Altman. Writ. Alan Rudolph and Robert Altman, from the play Indians by Arthur Kopit. Lion’s Gate, 1976. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Dir. McG. Writ. John August, Cormac Wibberly and Marianne Wibberly. Columbia, 2003. The Circus. Dir. and Writ. Charlie Chaplin. United Artists, 1928. “Clarifications.” The Wire. Dir. Anthony Hemingway. Writ. Dennis Lehane, from a story by David Simon and Dennis Lehane. HBO, 2008. The Clock. Dir. Vincente Minnelli. Writ. Robert Nathan and Joseph Schrank, from a story by Paul Gallico and Pauline Gallico. MGM, 1945. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” The X-Files. Dir. David Nutter. Writ. Darin Morgan. Fox, 1995. Coffee and Cigarettes. Dir. and Writ. Jim Jarmusch. United Artists, 2003. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Dir. Tay Garnett. Writ. Edmund Beloin, from the novel by Mark Twain. Paramount, 1949. Constantine. Dir. Francis Lawrence. Writ. Kevin Brobdin and Frank Cappello, from the comic book Hellblazer by Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis. Warner Brothers, 2005. Dead Man. Dir. and Writ. Jim Jarmusch. Miramax, 1995. Die Hard. Dir. John McTiernan. Writ. Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, from the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp. 20th Century Fox, 1988. 112 Filmography

Dr. No. Dir. Terence Young. Writ. Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood and Berkley Mather, from the novel by Ian Fleming. United Artists, 1962. Dr. Strangelove. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Writ. Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George, from the novel Red Alert by Peter George. Columbia, 1964. Duck Soup. Dir. Leo McCarey. Writ. Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Paramount, 1933. Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Writ. Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern. Columbia, 1969. Escape Plan. Dir. Mikael Hafstrom. Writ. Miles Chapman and Jason Keller, from a story by Miles Chapman. Summit, 2013. Four Rooms. Dir. and Writ. Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Miramax, 1995. Foxes. Dir. Adrian Lyne. Writ. Gerald Ayres. United Artists, 1980. The General. Dir. and Writ. Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton. United Artists, 1926. The Godfather. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Writ. Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, from Puzo’s novel. Paramount, 1972. The Great Gatsby. Dir. Baz Luhrmann. Writ. Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, from the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Warner Brothers, 2013. Groundhog Day. Dir. Harold Ramis. Writ. Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis. Columbia, 1993. Gun Crazy. Dir. Joseph H. Lewis. Writ. MacKinlay Kantor and Dalton Trumbo, from Kantor’s story. United Artists, 1950. Hamlet. Dir. Laurence Olivier. Writ. William Shakespeare, from the play. Universal, 1948. Hamlet. Dir. Michael Almereyda. Writ. Michael Almereyda, from the play by William Shakespeare. Miramax, 2000. “High Diddle Riddle.” Batman. Dir. Robert Butler. Writ. Lorenzo Semple, Jr. ABC, 1966. Filmography 113

High Society. Dir. Charles Walters. Writ. John Patrick, from the play The Philadelphia Story by Philip Barry. MGM, 1956. House of Games. Dir. and Writ. David Mamet. Orion, 1987. Identity Thief. Dir. Seth Gordon. Writ. Craig Mazin. Universal, 2013. “Indian Summer.” Mad Men. Dir. Tim Hunter. Writ. Tom Palmer and Matthew Wiener. AMC, 2007. Irma La Douce. Dir. Billy Wilder. Writ. Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, from the play by Alexandre Breffort. United Artists, 1963. It’s a Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. Writ. Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Frank Capra. RKO, 1946. Jackie Brown. Dir. and Writ. Quentin Tarantino, from the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard. Miramax, 1997. Kingsman. Dir. Matthew Vaughn. Writ. Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, from the comic book The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. 20th Century Fox, 2014. The Lady From Shanghai. Dir. and Writ. Orson Welles, from the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King. Columbia, 1947. Last Action Hero. Dir. John McTiernan. Writ. Shane Black and David Arnott. Columbia, 1993. “Man From the South.” Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Dir. Norman Lloyd. Writ. William Fay, from the story by Roald Dahl. CBS, 1960. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Dir. Nagisa Oshima. Writ. Nagisa Oshima and Paul Mayersberg, from the novel The Seed and the Sower by Laurens Van der Post. Artisan Entertainment, 1983. Modern Times. Dir. and Writ. Charlie Chaplin. United Artists, 1936. Monsieur Beaucaire. Dir. George Marshall. Writ. Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, from the novel by Booth Tarkington. Paramount, 1946. “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.” The X-Files. Dir. James Wong. Writ. Glen Morgan. Fox, 1996. 114 Filmography

Mystery Train. Dir. and Writ. Jim Jarmusch. Orion, 1989. Nightmare Alley. Dir. Edmund Goulding. Writ. Jules Furthman, from the novel by William Linsay Greshem. 20th Century Fox, 1947. Now, Voyager. Dir. Irving Rapper. Writ. Casey Robinson, from the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty. Warner Brothers, 1942. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Dir. Peter Hunt. Writ. Richard Maibaum, from the novel by Ian Fleming. United Artists, 1969. The Petrified Forest. Dir. Archie L. Mayo. Writ. Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves, from the play by Robert E. Sherwood. Warner Brothers, 1936. “The Phantom.” Mad Men. Dir. Matthew Wiener. Writ. Jonathan Igla and Matthew Wiener. AMC, 2012. The Plainsman. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Writ. Waldemar Young, Harold Lamb and Lynn Riggs. Paramount, 1936. The Princess and the Pirate. Dir. David Butler. Writ. Everett Freeman, Don Hartman and Mel Shavelson. RKO, 1944. Quest For Fire. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Writ. Gerard Brach, from the novel by J. H. Rosny. Special languages created by Anthony Burgess. 20th Century Fox, 1981. Raising Arizona. Dir. Joel Coen. Writ. Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 20th Century Fox, 1987. Rear Window. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Writ. John Michael Hayes, from the story by Cornell Woolrich. Paramount, 1954. Reservoir Dogs. Dir. and Writ. Quentin Tarantino. Miramax, 1992. Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip. Dir. Joe Layton. Writ. Richard Pryor. Columbia, 1982. Road to Singapore. Dir. Victor Schertzinger. Writ. Don Hartman and Frank Butler. Paramount, 1940. “Root Beer Guy.” Adventure Time. Dir. and Writ. Graham Falk, from a story by Kent Osborne, Pendleton Ward, Jack Pendarvis and Adam Muto. Cartoon Network, 2013. Seven Men from Now. Dir. Budd Boetticher. Writ. Burt Kennedy. Warner Brothers, 1956. Filmography 115

The Shop Around the Corner. Dir. Ernst Lubitsch. Writ. Samson Raphaelson, from a play by Miklos Laszlo. MGM, 1940. Silent Movie. Dir. Mel Brooks. Writ. Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca and Barry Levinson. 20th Century Fox, 1976. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Mad Men. Dir. Alan Taylor. Writ. Matthew Wiener. AMC, 2007. Song of the Thin Man. Dir. Edward Buzzell. Writ. Steve Fisher and Nat Perrin, from characters by Dashiell Hammett. MGM, 1947. Stalag 17. Dir. Billy Wilder. Writ. Billy Wilder and Edwin Blum, from the play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski. Paramount, 1953. “A Star is Born.” SCTV. Dir. John Blanchard. NBC, 1983. Strangers on a Train. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Writ. Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde, from the novel by Patricia Highsmith. Warner Brothers, 1951. “The Strategy.” Mad Men. Dir. Phil Abraham. Writ. Semi Chellas. AMC, 2014. “Three of a Kind.” The X-Files. Dir. Bryan Spicer. Writ. Vince Gilligan and John Shiban. Fox, 1999. Three on a Match. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Writ. Lucien Hubbard. Warner Brothers, 1932. The Time Machine. Dir. George Pal. Writ. David Duncan, from the novel by H. G. Wells. MGM, 1960. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Dir. Tomas Alfredson. Writ. Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughn, from the novel by John le Carré. StudioCanal, 2011. Trafic. Dir. and Writ. Jacques Tati. Columbia, 1971. “Two Too Young.” Our Gang short. Dir. Gordon Douglas. Writ. Hal Law, Louis McManus and Tom Bell. MGM, 1936. Veronica Mars. Dir. Rob Thomas. Writ. Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero, from the television series created by Rob Thomas. Warner Brothers, 2014.

116 Filmography

WALL-E. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Writ. Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon. Disney, 2008. Young Frankenstein. Dir. Mel Brooks. Writ. Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks. 20th Century Fox, 1974. YouTube. “BRICO PRAM Tiny Gong.AVI.” Originally uploaded May 16, 2010. YouTube. “Flintstones Cigarette Commercial.” Originally uploaded January 18, 2007. YouTube. “The SINGING POSTMAN—‘Hev Yew Gotta Loight Boy?’—1964.” Originally uploaded February 10, 2009.

Filmography 117

INDEX

2001: A Space Odyssey (­Kubrick)  32 Abbott, Megan  24, 34 Adventure Time  70, 76 affluence  30–1, 34, 50, 51, 52–3 Albert, Eddie  28 Alfalfa 47 Alfa Romeo  85 Alfred Hitchcock Presents 78 Alfredson, Tomas Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 21 Alice Doesn’t Live Here ­Anymore (Scorsese) 14 Almereyda, Michael  74 Hamlet 74 Alphaville (Godard)  15, 18–19, 26, 76, 92 Altman, Robert  26 aluminum  20, 36, 77 American Tobacco ­Company  51

Andersen, Hans C ­ hristian  80 “Poor Little Match Girl” 80 Annaud, Jean-Jacques Quest for Fire 59 Antique Automobile ­Magazine 84 Apollo 132 Apperson, George Latimer The Social History of ­Smoking  50, 58 Arabian Nights 17 Aristophanes 33 The Clouds 33 Army of Darkness (Raimi)  47 arson 69 see also fire Ashby, Hal Being There 94 aspirations 30 Atkins, Ace  71 Atlantic 9 Australia 84 Automobile Manufacturers of America 83–4

B-19 36 Bacall, Lauren  15, 92 Backdraft (Howard)  17 Bacon, Roger  33 Bad Habits: Drinking, ­Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual ­Misbehavior and ­Swearing in American History (Burnham)  50 Bad News Bears, The (­Ritchie)  19 Bailey, George  79, 81, 82 Ballard, Ted  1–12, 13, 25, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 40, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 53, 54, 55, 59, 61–5, 70, 71, 80, 81, 84, 87–9, 96, 99–100 Bancroft, Anne  93 Barnes, Julian  48 Flaubert’s Parrot 48 Barrymore, Lionel  4 Barton Fink (Coen ­Brothers)  77–8 Bat Boy  76 Batman 26 bats 48 Bay Area  30–1 Being There (Ashby)  94 Belgium 72 Bellboy, The (Lewis)  93 Belushi, John  84–5 120 INDEX

Benlow 43 Benson, Bob  45 Bensonhurst, Brooklyn (NY) 19–20 Bergman, Ingmar  93 Between Wrecks (­Singleton)  85 Beverly Hills (CA)  23 Bic  34, 37–8, 42, 43, 46, 70, 77, 82, 89 blue 35 J1 37 white 34–5 Big Night (Tucci)  32 Big Sleep, The (Hawks)  92 Bimbo the Clown  4 Biograph Theater  24 Bisconsini, Stefano  25 Blackbeard 8 black crackle  64 Blaisdell, George  38, 64 Blitz 43 Block, Marcelline  21 Blondell, Joan  81 Blood Simple (Coen ­Brothers)  22, 75, 92 Boardwalk Empire 31 Boetticher, Budd Seven Men from Now 14–15 Bogart, Humphrey  57, 92 Bond, James  18, 73 Bonsack, James Albert  50–1, 56, 57, 67

cigarette-rolling ­machines  50–1, 56, 57, 67, 87 Borg, Jack  29 Boyle, Peter  16–17 Boyle, William  19–20 branding  39, 42, 43, 53, 57, 64, 70, 85, 86 break-spark 37 Brico Pram 85–6 Bright Leaf (Curtiz)  15, 51, 52–3, 87, 97 Brinkley, Douglas  73, 86–7 Brody, Richard  76 Brooks, Mel  93 Silent Movie 93 Young Frankenstein 16–17 Brothers Rico, The (­Karlson)  91–2 Bruckheimer, Jerry  73 Buchanan, Sherry  39, 43 Vietnam Zippos  39, 43 Bull Durham  55, 57 Burke, Jackie  37–8 Burnham, John C.  50 Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual ­Misbehavior and Swearing in American History 50 Burns, Eric  54–5

Burr, Raymond  47, 95, 96 Burstyn, Ellen  14 butane 71 Butler, David The Princess and the ­Pirate 46 Butler, Frank  26–7 buzz box  88–9 Calamity Jane  52 Camels 55 Cancer Man  16 cannibalism 7 Capra, Frank It’s a Wonderful Life  79, 81 Caracarramo, Eugene  20 carbide 87 Carmen 56 cars 83–9 see also individual manufacturers Cars of the Thirties and Forties (Sedgwick) 83 Cartier 30 Casco 84 Casso, Gaspipe  19 Caution, Lemmy  26 cedar  71, 72 celebrities  23–5, 39–40 Chaplin, Charlie  73, 94 The Circus 73 Modern Times 94 Charles, Nick  69–70 INDEX 121

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (Nichol) 72–3 Chekhov, Anton  95 chewing tobacco see tobacco China  48–9, 58 Chopin, Frédéric  4 chute de pouce, la  76–7 Cigarette Book, The (Harrald, Watkins)  14, 43, 63 cigarette-rolling ­machines  50–1, 56, 57, 67, 87 cigarettes  13–16, 18, 19, 20, 26, 28–9, 37, 39, 42, 49–53, 56–8, 61, 63, 67–8, 69, 73, 80, 81–2, 83, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97 cigars  50, 51, 52, 53, 71–2, 81, 83–4, 85, 86 v. cigarettes  53, 81, 85 Circus, The (Chaplin)  73 City Grocery Bar  19 Civil War  51, 52, 64–5 Clock, The (Minnelli)  41–2 Clouds, The (­Aristophanes)  33 Cobain, Kurt  35 Coen Brothers  22 Barton Fink 77–8 Blood Simple  22, 75, 92 Raising Arizona 70 122 INDEX

Coffee and Cigarettes (­Jarmusch)  39, 69, 75 Cold War  28 Cole Friction Lighter  30 collections  23–8, 29, 30, 37, 70, 87–8, 99–100 Colt 27 Columbus, Christopher  6, 7, 50, 53–4, 56 comedy  28, 46, 93–4 Confucius 33 Congressional Gold ­Medal  25 Connecticut Museum of ­History  84 Connecticut Yankee in King ­Arthur’s Court, A (Twain)  27, 46 Connery, Sean  18 Constantine (Lawrence)  76 Constantine, Eddie  15, 76 Constantinople 54 Conte, Richard  91–2 Coogan, Steve  75 Cooper, Gary  15, 19, 52–3, 57, 97 Coppola, Francis Ford The Godfather 16 Corleone, Michael  16 Corleone, Vito  16 Costello, Elvis  69 Crimean War  51, 56

Crosby, Bing  46, 47 Cross 25 Crouse, Lindsay  14, 16, 31, 95 Crowe, Cameron  74 Cuba 81 Cummins, Peggy  26 Currie, Cherie  40 Curtiz, Michael Bright Leaf  15, 51, 52–3, 87, 97 Dahl, Roald  78–9, 81 “Man from the South” 78–9, 81 Davidson, D. C.  33–4 Spectacles, Lorgnettes and Monocles 33–4 Davis, Bette  13, 81 Davis, Miles  5 Dead Man (Jarmusch)  58, 96–7 death  9–10, 17, 19, 43, 46, 65, 67, 73, 74 Delarelle 86 DeMille, Cecil B.  52 The Plainsman  52, 57 De Niro, Robert  17 Dennis the Menace  47 Depp, Johnny  96 design  27, 37, 38, 39, 55, 63, 64 Detroit (MI)  87 DiCaprio, Leonardo  84

Dictionary of Ancient ­Deities 49 Die Hard (McTiernan)  75 Dillinger, John  24 disposability  34–5, 38, 40, 43, 70 see also Bic doppelgängers 19 Draper, Don  17–18 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop ­Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick)  29 Duck Soup (McCarey)  93 Duesenberg 10 Duncan (OK)  3 Dunhill  30–1, 34, 72 Durg, India  10 Durkee, Lee  76 Dutch fuck  14–15 Dvorak, Ann  81 earthquakes 9 Easy Rider (Hopper)  14 eBay 2 Ebola 87 Einstein, Albert  4 Eken, Rose  89 electric massagers  84 Eliade, Mircea  45, 46 England  34, 48, 51, 55 erotica 10–11 see also sex Escape Plan (Håfström)  26 Eskimos 6 INDEX 123

Eve 15 Extracts from 44 Recorded Tapes 4 Farber, Manny  24 Farouk of Egypt, King  10–11 Faulkner, William  57, 77 If I Forget Thee, ­Jerusalem 57 Ferrari 85 ferrocerium 49 Feudor 77 Fiat  83, 85 Balilla 83 Finch, Atticus  28 fire  17, 45–52, 47–8, 49, 59, 67, 69, 72, 80, 88, 96 Firth, Colin  73 Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby 84 Flanagan, Roy C.  51 Flaubert’s Parrot (Barnes)  48 Fleming, Ian  69 From Russia with Love 69 flint 49 see also ferrocerium Flintsone, Fred  49 Florida 99 Fonda, Peter  14 Ford Model T  88–9 Ford, Clara  87 Ford, Edsel  87 Ford, Henry  73, 86, 88 124 INDEX

Four Rooms (Tarantino)  81–2 Foxes (Lyne)  40 Foxhole Blackout  81 France  5, 11, 51, 56, 72, 76–7 Frank & Joe’s Bakery  19 Frankenstein 88 Franklin, Tom  71, 89, 92 Freud, Sigmund  52, 53, 67, 93 Fried, Johannes  33 From Russia with Love (­Fleming)  69 Fuert, Clyde  77 fusee  8, 9, 48 Fu-Shen 49 Fussell, Paul  57, 61, 63, 80 The Great War and Modern Memory  57–8, 80 Wartime: ­Understanding and Behavior in the ­Second World War 61, 80 Gandhi, Indira  10, 11 Garland, Judy  42 gender  38, 45, 50, 52, 53, 57–8, 59, 67, 70–1, 75–7, 77–8, 81, 91–2, 93, 96 General, The (Keaton)  94 Giuffre, Jimmy  5 Godard, Jean-Luc  18–19

Alphaville  15, 18–19, 26, 76, 92 Godfather, The (Coppola)  16 gold  24, 25, 30, 31, 53, 72 Golding, William  47 Lord of the Flies 47–8 Google  34, 75 Gordon, Seth Identity Thief 72–3 Goulding, Edmund Nightmare Alley 10 Graf Zeppelin  33 Grahame, Gloria  69–70 Grand Central Hotel  8 Granger, Farley  16, 42 grease 6–7 grease lamps  6–7 Great Gatsby, The (­Fitzgerald)  84 Great Gatsby, The (­Luhrmann)  84 Great War and Modern ­Memory, The (­Fussell)  57–8, 80 Green’s Dictionary of Slang 14 Gregg, James R.  32–3 The Story of ­Optometry 32–3 Gremillion, Kristen J.  58 Grijalva, Juan de  56 Groundhog Day (Ramis)  92–3 guano see manure

Guardian 21 Guevara, Che  81 Gun Crazy (Lewis)  26, 27 gunpowder  27, 46, 48 guns  9, 26–8, 47, 65 Guthrie (OK)  2, 23 GZA 39 Håfström, Mikael Escape Plan 26 HAL 32 Halliburton 3 Hamlet (Almereyda)  74 Hamlet (Olivier)  74 Handbook of Vintage Cigarette Lighters, The (­Schneider, Pilossof)  8–9, 21, 38, 43 Harrald, Chris The Cigarette Book  14, 43, 63 Harris, Joan  45 Hawks, Howard The Big Sleep 92 Hayworth, Rita  14 Haze  85, 86 Heimann, Robert K.  56 Tobacco & Americans 56 Hemingway, Ernest 99 Hendrix, Jimi  35 Henreid, Paul  13 Hepburn, Audrey  28 INDEX 125

“Hev Yew Gotta Light, Boy?” (Smethurst) 15 Hickock, Wild Bill  52 High Society (Walters)  47 Hindenburg 33 Hitchcock, Alfred  21, 42, 82 Rear Window 47 Strangers on a Train  16, 21, 40, 42 Holden, William  16, 53, 71 Hollywood  30, 93 Home, James W. Way Out West 94 Home Declamatory ­Contest  77 Hope: Entertainer of the ­Century (Zoglin)  25 Hope, Bob  16, 23–5, 28, 29–30, 46 Hopper, Dennis Easy Rider 14 House of Games (Mamet)  14, 31, 95 Howard, Ron Backdraft 17 Identity Thief (Gordon)  72–3 If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (Faulkner) 57 Iggy Pop  39 ignition  7–10, 37, 48–9, 61–5, 68, 76, 88 see also fire India  10, 11 126 INDEX

Indo-Pakistani ­conflicts  10, 11 Second Kashmir War  11 War of 1971  11 Infante, G. Cabrera  14, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 73, 81 Iran 38 Ireland 56 Irma la Douce (Wilder)  15 Isabella of Spain, Queen  53 Israel 58 It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra)  79, 81 Jackson, Samuel L.  74 Japan  1, 64 Jarmusch, Jim  15, 39, 58, 69 Coffee and Cigarettes  39, 69, 75 Dead Man  58, 96–7 Mystery Train  15, 19 Jefferson, Thomas  4 Jerez, Rodrigo de  54 Jharkhand, Pakistan  11 Joe Blow stories  64 Joe Camel  55 Johnnie Walker Blue  20 Joplin, Janis  35 Junior’s 70 Kaplan, Justin  93, 94 Karina, Anna  15 Karlson, Phil The Brothers Rico 91–2

Kay, Connie  5, 6, 16 Keaton, Buster  94 The General 94 Kenard 35 Kennedy, John F.  25 Kennedy, Mr.  5–6, 11 Kia, Mehrdad  55 King, Stephen  39 Revival 39 Kingsman: The Secret Service (Vaughn) 73 Korea  5, 6 Korean War  5, 18 Koven, Seth  31 Kristofferson, Kris  14 Kubrick, Stanley 2001: A Space ­Odyssey 32 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop ­Worrying and Love the Bomb 29 Kudo, Yuki  15 Laager, Casper  8 Lady from Shanghai, The (Welles) 14 Last Action Hero (­McTiernan)  74, 75 “Last Match, The” (­Mauldin)  63 Las Vegas (NV)  79 Laurel, Stan  94

Lawrence, Francis Constantine 76 Layton, Joe Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip 94 Lazenby, George  18 Leak, Kelly  19 Legend of the Lighter, The (Van Weert, et al.)  27, 28, 31, 36, 38, 39, 45, 72, 76–7 lenses  32–4, 46, 47–8 Leonard, Elmore  37 Rum Punch 37–8 LeRoy, Mervyn Three on a Match  78, 81 Lewis, Jerry  92, 93, 95 The Bellboy 93 Lewis, Joseph H. Gun Crazy  26, 27 Life 64 Lincoln, Abraham  52 Little Gem  65 London, England  51 Lord of the Flies (­Golding)  46–8 Lorre, Peter  79, 80, 82 Lubitsch, Ernst The Shop Around the ­Corner 23 Lucite 36 Luckett, Semmes  38, 39–40 Luhrmann, Baz  84 The Great Gatsby 84 INDEX 127

Lynch, David  73 Lyne, Adrian Foxes 40 Macbeth (Shakespeare)  67 McCarey, Leo Duck Soup 93 McDormand, Frances  92 McElwee, Ross  97 McFadden, Cyra  30–1 The Serial 30–1 McKay, Charles  51 MacLaine, Shirley  15 McQueen, Steve  79–80, 82 McTiernan, John Die Hard 75 Last Action Hero  74, 75 Mad Men  17–18, 21, 45, 84 Maebon, Linda  40 magic  19, 20, 45, 48, 74, 85, 92, 94 Mailer, Norman  24 Mamet, David  14, 95 House of Games 14, 31, 95 “Man from the South” (Dahl)  78–9, 81 Mann, Anthony Raw Deal 95 Mantegna, Joe  14, 31 manure 48 Marcus Aurelius  82 Mardi Gras  16 128 INDEX

marketing  38, 39, 48, 64, 70, 83–4, 86 Mars, Veronica  75 Marshall, George Monsieur Beaucaire 46 Marvin, Lee  14–15 Marx, Harpo  93 matches  31, 41, 46–7, 63, 69, 70–3, 77, 80, 81, 82, 95 Matthau, Walter  19 Mauldin, Bill  63 “The Last Match”  63 Mayo, Archie The Petrified Forest 57 Mencken, H. L.  28 Merry Christmas, Mr. ­Lawrence (­Oshima)  73 Mexico  56, 67 Mike Douglas Show, The 92 Mingus, Charles  5 Minnelli, Vincente  41 The Clock 41–2 misanthropes 17 misogyny 77–8 see also gender Modern Jazz Quartet  5 Modern Times (Chaplin)  94 MoMA see Museum of ­Modern Art (MoMA) monocles  32, 33 Monroe (WA) Monitor 29 Monsieur Beaucaire (­Marshall)  46

Moore, Jerry D. The Prehistory of Home 17 Moravia (IA)  77 Morgan, Hank  27, 93 Morrison, Jim  35 Moviegoer, The (Percy)  15–16, 53 Mr. Blonde  73 Mudbone 95 mummies 7 Murad the Cruel  55 Murray, Bill  39, 92–3 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)  25, 37, 43 “Shaping Modernity: ­Design 1880–1980” 37 Muslims  53, 54 Muto, Adam  76 Mystery Train (Jarmusch)  15, 19 Nagase, Masatoshi  19 National Lighter Museum  1–12, 41 National Review 53 Native Americans  4, 6, 50, 56, 58, 96 Nazis 53 Neal, Patricia  97 Needham, Hal  30, 34 Netflix 39 Netherlands 55

New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, The 50 New England  6 New World  50, 55, 58, 79 New York City  56 Nichol, Joseph McGinty Charlie’s Angels: Full ­Throttle 72–3 nicotine addiction  15, 50, 51, 61 Nietzsche, Friedrich  82 Nightmare Alley (­Goulding)  10 Ninevah 32 Norton, Marcy  54 “No Shade Ever” (­Singleton)  83 Now, Voyager (Rapper)  13–14 nudity  29, 62 Oakley, Annie  27 obsolescence  29, 30 Okinawa, Japan  64 Oklahoma  3, 9, 70 Oklahoma City (OK)  70 Oldman, Gary  21 Olivier, Laurence  74 Hamlet 74 Omar 35 opium 4 optimism 79 Osborne, Kent  73 INDEX 129

Oshima, Nagisa Merry Christmas, Mr. ­Lawrence 73 Ottoman Empire  54 Our Gang 47 Out West 96 overalls 62 Oxford (MS)  2, 19 Pakistan  10, 11 Paris, France  5, 11, 51 Peck, Gregory  28 Pentagon 1 Percy, Walker  15 The Moviegoer  15–16, 53 perfume 38 Perkins, Carl  19 personalization  16, 18, 20, 21–2, 24–5, 39, 64 Peshawar, Pakistan  11 Petarbar, Pakistan  10, 11 Petrified Forest, The (Mayo)  57 Philadelphia (PA)  7–8 Philadelphia Times 7–8 Philippines 1 phossy jaw  31 Piggy 47–8 Pilossof, Ira The Handbook of Vintage Cigarette Lighters 8–9, 21, 38, 43 pipes  33, 37, 50, 55, 58, 63, 78, 81, 87 130 INDEX

pirates  8, 24, 46 Pitt, Brad  84 Plainsman, The (­DeMille)  52, 57 Pliny 33 Plowright, Joan  74 pockets  2, 22, 25, 27, 35, 42, 62–3, 67, 71 patting  22, 42 pocket watches  46, 62, 63 Poore, David  38, 58 Zippo: The Great American Lighter  38, 58 “Poor Little Match Girl” (­Andersen)  80 Popular Mechanics 63 Porky 47 Potter, Harry  73 Prehistory of Home, The (Moore) 17 Prevost, Marie  17 Princess and the Pirate, The (Butler) 46 Pryor, Richard  35, 82, 91, 94–5 punk 39 Puritanism 96–7 Pyle, Ernie  40–1, 43, 63–4 Joe Blow stories  64 Pyne, Stephen J.  70 Quest for Fire (Annaud)  59

Raimi, Sam Army of Darkness 47 Raising Arizona (Coen ­Brothers)  70 Ramis, Harold Groundhog Day 92–3 Rapper, Irving Now, Voyager 13–14 Raw Deal (Mann)  95 Rear Window (Hitchcock)  47 Reeves, Keanu  76 reliability 38 see also Zippo Remington 47 Rene 21–2 repurposing 27 Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino)  73 revenuers 2 Revival (King)  39 Richard Pryor: Live on the ­Sunset Strip (­Layton)  94 Richmond (VA)  51 Riddler 26 Ritchie, Michael The Bad News Bears 19 Road to Singapore (­Schertzinger)  47 Robinson, David  94 Rock-A-Way Tavern  9 Roman Holiday (Wyler)  28–9 Ronson 20 Rosenbaum, Jonathan  96–7

Rubble, Barney  49 Rum Punch (Leonard)  37–8 Runaways 40 RZA 39 Saturn 89 Saul, Scott  94 Savage, Abe Uncle Hezekiah’s CigaretteLighter  77–8, 79, 82 “Scenes from an Idiot’s ­Marriage”  93 Schertzinger, Victor Road to Singapore 47 Schiavo, Sal  20 Schneider, Stuart The Handbook of Vintage Cigarette Lighters 8–9, 21, 38, 43 Schwarzenegger, Arnold  26, 74, 75 Scorsese, Martin Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 14 scrotum human  1, 2, 6, 50 tobacco pouches  1, 2, 6, 50 SCTV 93 “Scenes from an Idiot’s Marriage” 93 Scully, Agent  93 Second Kashmir War  11 INDEX 131

Sedgwick, Michael Cars of the Thirties and Forties 83 self-immolation  35, 82 see also suicide Sellers, Peter  29, 94 Serial, The (McFadden)  30–1 Seven Men from Now (­Boetticher)  14–15 sex  10–11, 13–15, 27, 29, 31, 42, 84 Shady Park  20 Shaker Experience in America, The: A History of the United Society of Believers (Stein)  58 Shakers 58 Shakespeare, William Macbeth 67 “Shaping Modernity: D ­ esign 1880–1980” 37 Shop Around the Corner, The (Lubitsch) 23 Silent Movie (Brooks)  93 Simon & Garfunkel  73 Singing Postman of Norfolk see Smethurst, Allan Singleton, George  83, 85 Between Wrecks 85 “No Shade Ever”  83 Smethurst, Allan  15 “Hev Yew Gotta Light, Boy?” 15 132 INDEX

Smiley, George  21 Smith, Bessie  4 smoker’s lamps  87, 88 smoking addiction  15, 50, 51, 61 affluence  30–1, 34, 50, 52–3 affordability  51, 63, 67–8, 71 branding  43, 55, 86 cars 83–9 cigarettes  13–16, 18, 19, 20, 26, 28–9, 37, 39, 42, 49–53, 56–8, 61, 63, 67–8, 69, 73, 80, 81–2, 83, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97 cigars  50, 51, 52, 53, 71–2, 81, 83–4, 85, 86 dangers  8, 9–10, 57–8, 80, 84, 97 death  43, 65, 73 design  35, 37, 38, 39 film  13–16, 18–19, 21, 22, 26, 28–9, 31, 32, 39, 40, 41–2, 45, 52, 57, 69, 70–1, 72–5, 73–6, 77–8, 78, 79, 81–2, 84, 91–7 flight 33 gender  50, 52, 53, 57–8, 67, 70–1, 75–7, 77–8, 81, 91–2, 93, 96 health  20, 31, 85, 96, 97

identity  17–20, 21, 22 intimacy  14–19, 26–7, 28–9, 31, 32, 42, 68, 91–7 joints 71 literature  27, 37–8, 39, 69, 78–9, 84, 93, 94 marketing  39, 52–3, 55–6, 83–4, 86 Native Americans  50, 56, 58, 96 paraphernalia  1, 17–18, 20, 41, 53 pipes  33, 37, 50, 55, 58, 63, 78, 81, 87 popular culture  39–40, 42, 43, 57, 63, 69, 78–9 punishment 54–5 romanticization  17–18, 82 sacrament  58, 59 safety 85–6 sex  13–15, 17, 27, 29, 31, 42, 83, 84 social  50–1, 51, 58 TV  14–15, 16, 17–18, 26, 31, 35, 49, 78, 79, 82, 93 underage 55–6 war  1, 7, 10–11, 18, 31, 36, 39, 40–1, 42, 43, 50, 51, 56, 57–8, 61, 63–4, 70, 80–1 Snowdon, Christopher  54

snuff tubes  8 Social History of Smoking, The (Apperson)  50, 58 Socrates 33 Sonnenfeld, Barry  22 Spain  54, 56 Spectacles, Lorgnettes and Monocles (­Davidson)  33–4 spittoons 51 sprinkler trope  75–6 S. T. Dupont  30 Stalag 17 (Wilder)  53, 70–1, 92 Stallone, Sylvester  26 Stein, Stephen J. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers 58 Stewart, Jimmy  47 Stork Club  70 Story of Optometry, The (Gregg) 32–3 Strangers on a Train (­Hitchcock)  16, 21, 40, 42 Styx 89 suicide  35, 82, 94–5 Sutherland, Donald  17 Tarantino, Quentin  81 Four Rooms 81–2 Reservoir Dogs 73 INDEX 133

Tati, Jacques  45 Trafic 45 Taylor, Rod  46–7 technology  29–30, 32–3, 36–7, 50–1, 63, 89 Thomas, Dave  25 Thomas, Rob  75–6 Veronica Mars 75 Thompson, Hunter S.  38 Thompson, Nucky  31 Three on a Match (LeRoy)  78, 81 Thurm, Nathan  52 Tilly, Eustace  47 Time Machine, The (Wells) 47 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (­Alfredson)  21 tobacco  6, 15, 17, 43, 51–56, 58, 78, 87, 97 Tobacco & Americans (­Heimann)  56 tobacco pouches  1, 2, 50 human scrotum  1, 2, 6, 50 Top of the Needle  29 Trafic (Tati)  45 Transportation Safety ­Administration (TSA) 70 TriStar 74 TSA see Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) 134 INDEX

Tucci, Stanley Big Night 32 Tunisia 70 Tupelo (MS)  95 Turkey  51, 53, 54–5 Twain, Mark  7, 27, 46, 47, 51, 93, 94 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court  27, 46 Twitter 42 Uncle Hezekiah’s CigaretteLighter (Savage)  77–8, 79, 82 Urban Dictionary  35 urban legends  35, 43 US Fire Administration  69 US State Department  53–4 Van Weert, Ad The Legend of the ­Lighter  27, 28, 31, 36, 38, 39, 45, 72, 76–7 Vaughn, Matthew Kingsman: The Secret ­Service 73 Vavrek, Col. Frank  43 Veronica Mars (Thomas)  75 Versailles 6 “Victim of a Cigarette Lighter, A”  8 Vietnam War  18, 39

Vietnam Zippos (­Buchanan) 

39, 43

Waits, Tom  39 Walker, Robert  16, 41–2 WALL-E  15, 64 Wallman, Dr. Harold  29 Walsh, M. Emmett  92 Walters, Charles High Society 47 war  1, 7, 10–11, 29, 31, 33, 36, 39, 40–1, 42, 43, 50, 51, 56, 57–8, 61–2, 63–5, 70, 80–1 War of 1971  11 Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (­Fussell)  61, 80 Watkins, Fletcher The Cigarette Book 14, 43, 63 Way Out West (Home)  94 wealth see affluence Weekly World News 76 Welles, Orson The Lady from S­ hanghai 14 Wells, H. G.  47 The Time Machine 47 whale oil  6–7 white lighter myth  34–5 White Stripes  39 Wico 86

Wikipedia 55 Wilder, Billy  74 Irma la Douce 15 Stalag 17  53, 70–1, 92 Willis, Bruce  75 Wilson, Charles Regan  50–1 Winchell, Walter  70 Wire, The 35 wood alcohol  9–10 Wooster, Bertie  83 World War I  57–8, 61–2, 63, 80 World War II  1, 40–1, 43, 57, 63, 80 Wu-Tang Clan  39 Wyler, William Roman Holiday 28–9 X-Files  16–17, 93 Young Frankenstein (Brooks) 16–17 YouTube 85 Yucatán, Mexico  56 Zeischegg, Walter  37 Zippo  6, 18, 21–2, 30, 38–43, 58–9, 64 Zippo: The Great American Lighter (Poore)  38, 58 Zippo Museum  40 Zoglin, Richard  25 Hope: Entertainer of the Century 25 INDEX 135

136

137

138

139

140

141

142