During the heyday, Tom Cruise and wife Nicole Kidman gave Demi Moore a traveling humidor, and Danny DeVito let it be known that Arnold Schwarzenegger had turned him into a cigar-a-day man, and Tom Selleck confessed to the delight of puffing on a Montecristo No. 2 while reading scripts in his home smoking room.
Suddenly, a fat tube of tobacco that steadily had waned in popularity for nearly three decades catapulted to stardom, becoming a phenomenon, not merely something to smoke.
“It was the oral equivalent of the red power tie,” said Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, a think tank that analyzes consumer patterns. “It became synonymous with success.”
But the trajectory of the Cigar Season, those heady years when skyrocketing numbers of people clamored for premium, hand-rolled cigars that cost $1 apiece and considerably more, has collapsed.
“The cigar craze is over,” conceded Norman Sharp, president of the 62-year-old Cigar Association of America Inc., the industry’s trade group in Washington.
Sales of large cigars increased just 0.4 percent nationwide last year, a stark contrast to the peak growth year of 1996, when sales jumped 19 percent, according to association figures. Sales of premium cigars, the industry’s term for the costliest cigars, the category that drove the craze, have been flat or declining slightly over the past 18 months, Sharp said. During 1996 and 1997, by contrast, sales were rising by some 70 percent annually.
The fad’s decline has been brought about by a glut of cigars, a chorus of anti-smoking forces who attacked cigars’ ascendant popularity and any attendant perception that cigars were less harmful than cigarettes, and a sentiment that the trend, like so many before it–Hula-Hoops, leisure suits and disco come to mind–had run its course.
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“I don’t smoke cigars for the same reason I don’t wear three earrings anymore,” said Tom Doody, a Chicago marketing firm director, who used to favor what he described as a light, medium-gauge cigar. “It was to affect a certain identity.
“Now I think it stinks and looks stupid.”
Despite all the celebrities whose images burnished the cigar’s status, one household name famously tarnished the reputation of both the cigar and the American presidency. When Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s report was made public in September 1998, it chronicled in lurid detail the role a cigar played in the sexual exploits of President Clinton and a White House intern.
“Monica Lewinsky was the death knell of the cigar craze,” Celente said.
Not everyone is convinced. Illinois Gov. George Ryan, who confesses to puffing on a stogie occasionally behind closed doors, is squeezing a trip to the Partagas cigar factory in Old Havana during his current official visit to Cuba, where cigars remain a major business.
Cigar Aficionado, the celebrity-studded magazine that is the bible of the craze, and, some suggest, the very architect of it, continues to chronicle cigar-ana in scrupulous detail, though at half its former heft because of waning advertising and reduced newsstand sales.
Since its September 1992 debut, the magazine has queried its readers about issues such as whether they inhale (9 percent), who they consider to be the greatest cigar smoker of the 20th Century (Winston Churchill) and what city they consider most cigar friendly (New York followed by Chicago).
The magazine has broached issues that are painful for cigar lovers to acknowledge–such as the interview in which cover subject–and a symbol of smoking–Cuban President Fidel Castro insisted that he had given up cigars in 1985, despite repeated and incredulous proddings of “Not even a little puff?” Lewinsky is another matter.
“It’s not a subject we’ve dealt with in the magazine,” said Gordon Mott, Cigar Aficionado’s executive editor.
Money, not Monica, led Ralph Alvarez, a 38-year-old manager of an oil change business on Chicago’s South Side, to drop the habit.
After a boss turned him on to cigars, Alvarez smoked for about two years. “It was an experiment for me,” he said.
But two years ago when the thrill of the cigar became measured by its price, he quit. “It got to the point that we would be at a party and everybody would be trying to top everybody else by having the best cigar,” he said. “So, we would be standing around and I would be showing my $15-20 cigar and some other guy would have a $30-40 one and I thought, `Forget this.’ “
Prices have since crashed. In 1998, with scores of new cigar companies trying to cash in on the cigar’s newfound cachet, some 520 million premium cigars were imported into the U.S., nearly 200 million more than were sold, Mott said. As a result, he said, “Cigars are selling for pennies on the dollar. Cigars that had been selling for $1.60 at the wholesale level are selling for 20 cents.”
In 1998, the National Cancer Institute reviewed studies documenting links between cigars and cancer. In June this year, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study that linked cigars to some cancers and other diseases, and suggested that the combination of cigar smoking and alcohol may have a synergistic effect elevating the health risks. In an accompanying editorial, Surgeon General David Satcher called cigars the latest tobacco threat because they grew in popularity at a time when cigarette consumption declined, and because they appealed largely to “relatively well-educated people, who have traditionally eschewed cigarettes.”
In July, a Federal Trade Commission report responded to an unprecedented surge in cigar promotions in recent years by recommending that Congress require health warnings on cigar labels and ads, and place the same advertising restrictions that apply to cigarettes on cigars.
None of this suggests that cigars are about to disappear. Indeed, sales remain well above those of 1992, before the craze began.
“It’s just that demand has stopped growing,” said Roy Burry, an analyst with the East Coast Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., the nation’s oldest and largest private bank. The surplus of cigars led prices to plunge and hurt cigar producers, he said.
Another is in the fate of cigar shops and cigar bars that proliferated during the height of the trend and then closed.
In 1992, cigar bars did not exist in the U.S., Mott said. Though there are no statistics on the number now, he offered New York City as an example of the trend in major cities. At one point the city had between 20 and 30 cigar bars, a figure he estimates has fallen to about a half-dozen now.
In Chicago, Shelly’s Back Room, a Gold Coast-area cigar bar, and the Havana Cafe, a River North neighborhood Cuban restaurant that featured a cigar lounge in its basement, have closed. Though it remains “cigar friendly,” Biggs, an upscale Rush Street-area restaurant, closed its cigar and caviar bar about five months ago, two years after its creation.
When cigar smoking was most trendy, many restaurants and bars changed smoking policies to accommodate cigars, observed John Huguelet, general manager of Club Macanudo, a Gold Coast cigar bar whose entry is lined with mahogany humidors that bear the brass nameplates of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.
The smoke bothered few patrons, he said, and instead, “they were fascinated with it.”
Now, he said, “I’ve noticed that people are going back to a policy of `you can smoke at our bar as long as no one complains.’ “
Huguelet, who previously worked at Club Havana, said he noticed the clientele seemed to be experimenting with cigars. “You would get a lot of young people. I would never empty an ashtray with a completely finished cigar, which told me that they weren’t enjoying it,” he said. “They wanted to be seen doing it.”
By contrast, he said business at Club Macanudo, where cigars cost up to $45 apiece, had been steady because it included people who “really do enjoy their cigars.”
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Peer pressure led Donna Cerney, a Chicago advertising sales executive, to start smoking cigars, and, as of Labor Day, to quit.
“Demi Moore and Madonna were all smoking, and I thought, `I might as well,’ ” Cerney said. “I stopped when my friends stopped.”
Tom Culligan, another Chicago advertising executive, said he quit when cigar smoking became a fad. “I smoked cigars before it was popular, before it was trendy,” he said. “All of a sudden every yuppie was picking up a cigar, and I didn’t want to be lumped in with them.”
Besides, he confessed, “I didn’t like cigars that much anyway.”