Tuesday, February 24 2009
By Peter Coyote (
The San Francisco Chronicle)
In Havana, as celebrity bait at an event called the International Festival of Tobacco. Despite the fact that I no longer smoke cigars, they once played a marked role in my life, and that's enough of a thread to take advantage of the opportunity to see Havana.
In the 1940s and '50s, my father had a business client named Jack Campbell, an elegant and eccentric kadjillionaire who founded Dun & Bradstreet. He had an office over their shop in Manhattan from which he had removed an entire floor and replaced the ceiling with an ancient Italian terra cotta fresco that he'd bought in Italy and moved back to the States. Jack never wore socks under his handmade Lobb alligator loafers, had his underwear made to match by his shirt-maker, and was transported in one of two chauffeur-driven Isotta-Franchini's (the long limousine, made famous by New Yorker cartoons, where the chauffeur sits in an open-air section.) He had one follow the other in case the car he was riding in got a flat tire.
The lure of a fine Cuban cigar continues...
