S. H. Linden writes about...

A Surreptitious Cigar

Don,

I’ve taken up short story writing in the last couple of years. Even wrote a couple of screenplays about my travels throughout East Asia for clients, and my life in New York City. Two of the five scripts I wrote were optioned but never made it to the big screen.

I have film degrees from U. of Southern California, and New York University’s School of the Arts.

Paramount said they got my script too late to make a movie about China taking over Hong Kong. I had made China the heavies. And the other story was a hatchet job on the public relations industry. Columbia Tri-Star turned it down. I was told on the sly that right now the P.R. people are the power people, so forget it.

The “Late Lunch” story is true. I spent twenty years in New York City as a photojournalist and an advertising photographer.

As a matter of fact, it was in Elliott’s apartment on Central Park West that I had lunch the day I saw Costello when I was walking down to 57th Street to catch a cab.

Charlie Curtis was an art director and a friend. Unfortunately he died early of an heart attack. But we had that lunch when those Mafia guys were in the other booth. And the story is the absolute truth, just the way I described it.

If you have access to the June 2007 issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine, they published my memoir of smoking a banned Cuban cigar in the Oval Office of the White House with President John F. Kennedy.

There were a few guys in the office because we did the “PT 109” story for the Saturday Evening Post magazine. One of the guys was Pierre Salinger, the other was the author of the book, Robert Donovan, and the other guy was a friend and photographer, Elliott Erwitt.

Kennedy was in a good mood, and one of the guys, God bless his soul. He said, “Can you guys keep a secret?” And we all said yes. He then reached down to his bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a humidor, opened it, and tossed us all a cigar, the finest Cuban cigars that were made in the world. We sat back and had fun talking and smoking until a secretary came in and said, “Mr. President, you have a meeting in fifteen minutes.”

S. H. Linden