We know how irresponsible, unhealthy, noxious and politically incorrect the practice is considered today, but this country once unabashedly promoted smoking.

In one of my favorite Bette Davis films, 1942’s “Now, Voyager,” Davis and co-stars Claude Rains and Paul Heinreid weaved smoking seamlessly into the plot of successful psychiatry and doomed romance. Most poignant is the final scene, when Heinreid and Davis seal their mostly hopeless and totally sexless love pact with cigarettes—and the two smokes were fired up by Heinreid simultaneously. There was more than one way for a gentl...

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