Smoke Gets in His Buys

When Sotheby’s auctioned off items from the George Burns estate in 1996, Richard Carleton Hacker knew he had to have Burns’ humidor.

For 10 years before the comedian died in 1996, shortly after his 100th birthday, Hacker and Burns had been friends, united by their love of cigars.

A cigar was the one prop Burns was never without, and Hacker, who lives in Sherman Oaks, makes his living writing and lecturing about cigars, pipes and other “smokiana,” as he calls smoke-related stuff, as well as fine whiskeys, small-batch bourbons and other pleasures disdained by the self-righteous.

Indeed the humidor sat on Burns’ desk for years, and it was the humidor his aide dipped into when Burns directed, “Get the kid a cigar.”

Hacker never actually smoked the cigars that Burns gave him because they were lousy. Burns was fond of El Cheapos that came, Hacker explains, “in a glass tube, I guess so you couldn’t get to them.”

Hacker once asked Burns why he limited himself to such cheap smokes.

“You could buy Havanas. You could buy Havana,” Hacker pointed out.

Burns explained that he smoked cheap cigars because they tended to stay lit. (Cigars made of pure tobacco, as expensive ones are, require steady puffing or they’ll go out.) As every cigar-smoking comedian quickly learns, if you stop your act to light your cigar, you lose the audience.

“Look at Berle. He doesn’t smoke his cigar,” Burns said.

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Unlike Uncle Miltie, Burns lit his cigar on stage, and he also used to put a mark at a certain spot on the wrapper. When he had smoked down to that mark, he knew it was time to get off the stage.

When the humidor came up at Sotheby’s auction, Hacker raised his betting paddle and never put it down. He got the humidor for $8,625. “I took it home and put all those cigars George had given me back in the humidor. That’s where they belonged.”

People are surprised to discover that Hacker requests a nonsmoking room when he checks into a hotel. But, as he points out, cigar lovers rarely smoke in their rooms. And although he started smoking cigars and a pipe when he was a junior at Arizona State University, that’s all he smokes. “I’ve never smoked cigarettes, and I never will,” says Hacker, who says pipe and cigar smoking are about taste and relaxation, not about nicotine.

Earlier in the decade, when every upscale American male seemed to be a cigar aficionado, Hacker was making three appearances a week at cigar dinners and similar events here and abroad.

“I had to send pictures to my wife so she knew what I looked like,” recalls Hacker, who gives his age as “40 and holding.”

Since then, Macanudo madness seems to have waned some, and Hacker is devoting more of his time to pipes and spirits. He recently returned from a trip to Portugal, where he studied the making of port first-hand and even stomped some grapes. And he has just published a new book, “Rare Smoke: The Ultimate Guide to Pipe Collecting.” Like his earlier “ultimate” pipe and cigar books, it is available at tobacconists and by special order in bookstores.

Hacker was prompted to write the book after an exasperating encounter with pipe-related bushwah on the Internet. A friend who was trying to persuade him that he needed Internet access pulled up a posting on the dating code that appears on highly collectible Dunhill pipes. It was utter nonsense, Hacker says.

Appalled at the pipe-related ignorance swirling through cyberspace, he began putting down on paper what he’s learned in 25 years of study and in the course of collecting some 2,000 pipes, including clay models dating back to the 1700s and pipes made from the fine Algerian briar that’s now unavailable in the West because of political unrest in North Africa.

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Named Germany’s Pipe Knight of the Year in 1994, Hacker is also esteemed for his expertise in France, Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe. European collectors are different from American ones, he points out. Until recently, they were repelled by the readiness of Americans to collect and occasionally smoke so-called “estate pipes,” preowned briars that have been sanitized but retain the rich patina that only time and use confer.

According to Hacker, more and more Europeans are embracing the view that smoking a sanitized used pipe is no more disgusting than using silverware that has known other hands.

Pipe smoking is on the rise, he says, an increase that he attributes to the prohibitive cost of fine cigars and to the fact that a bowlful of memorable pipe tobacco will put you back 35 cents, once you’ve invested in a quality pipe.

Pipe collecting is also surging, as is the collecting of everything smoke-related, from ashtrays to humidors and rare cigars.

“Anything that is under attack by the government is going to have a bad-boy collectibility about it,” Hacker says. In addition, he speculates, “as we’re leaving the 20th century, people are looking for something to take with them as they enter the Brave New World.”

One of the joys of the profession Hacker has created for himself is the travel, all wonderfully tax deductible. Not long ago, he wandered through Scotland, searching for the perfect malt whiskey. That quest required a visit to Islay, a magical, fog-bound island that produces many of the finest smoky whiskeys.

“The spirits of the Druids are still patrolling the shoreline,” he says.

Hacker has also made seven trips to Cuba, which despite its desperate poverty retains its mystique as producer of the world’s finest cigars. On two occasions, he has met the most famous cigar aficionado of them all, Fidel Castro.

Once renowned for his fondness for Cohibas, Castro was said to have given up cigars in the mid-1980s. Castro was indeed abstinent when Hacker saw him in February of this year.

But that wasn’t true the first time Hacker met Castro. You can’t fool an educated nose.

“When I saw him in 1992,” Hacker recalls, “his clothes smelled of cigar smoke.”