Big tobacco meets the boob tube in this incendiary satire from the bestselling author of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
Jefferson Tatum is a self-made man. Founder of Tatum Cigarette Company, he wrote the brand’s advertising jingle—“Tatums smoke mild like an innocent child”—and has been bringing home big money—and hunting huge bears—ever since. But this year his tobacco sales are down 3 percent thanks to the surgeon general’s cancer warnings. To make matters worse, Tatum’s forty-three-year-old son, Virgil, shows more interest in presiding over his unaccredited college and its undefeated football team than learning about the family business.
Hoping to kill two birds with one stone, Tatum sets out to reinvigorate his company by transforming Acanthus College into a top-tier research institution. The school’s scientists will prove that food is more dangerous than cigarettes, making everyone so anxious they’ll start smoking again. But when Tatum hires a New York theater director turned Hollywood bigwig to produce a documentary about the research, nothing goes as planned. Secrets are unearthed, old loves are rekindled, and a TV director with a conscience (will wonders never cease?) threatens to expose the whole scam.
Max Shulman (1919–1988) was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer best known as the author of Rally Round the Flag, Boys! (1957), The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1951), and the popular television series of the same name. The son of Russian immigrants, Shulman was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended the University of Minnesota, where he wrote a celebrated column for the campus newspaper and edited the humor magazine. His bestselling debut novel, Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1943), was followed by two books written while he served in the Army during World War II: The Feather Merchants (1944) and The Zebra Derby (1946). The Tender Trap (1954), a Broadway play cowritten with Robert Paul Smith, was adapted into a movie starring Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds. His acclaimed novel Rally Round the Flag, Boys! became a film starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Shulman’s other books include Sleep till Noon (1950), a hilarious reinvention of the rags-to-riches tale; I Was a Teenage Dwarf (1959), which chronicles the further adventures of Dobie Gillis; Anyone Got a Match? (1964), a prescient satire of the tobacco, television, and food industries; and Potatoes Are Cheaper (1971), the tale of a romantic Jewish college student in depression-era St. Paul. His movies include The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (with Debbie Reynolds and Bob Fosse) and House Calls (with Walter Mathau and Glenda Jackson). One of America’s premier humorists, he greatly influenced the comedy of Woody Allen and Bob Newhart, among many others.