Churchill Is Latest Smoker to Have Habit Stubbed Out

LONDON (June 16) -- At a 1945 lunch with the king of Saudi Arabia, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was told that he couldn't spark up a stogie in the pious monarch's presence. The wartime leader protested, saying his own "rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars ... before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them." Sensibly, the Saudi ruler relented.

Nowadays, though, some people aren't so willing to indulge the ex-prime minister's addiction. Like the unknown censor who airbrushed a cigar from an iconic photo of Churchill that adorns the entrance to London's Britain at War Museum.

Taken at the opening of a new air base in 1948, the poster shows the wartime chief flashing his famous V for victory sign. But the Cuban roll that was originally clamped between Churchill's lips has disappeared, leaving the prime minister with an unseemly open-mouthed gawp.

"Viewing the now disfigured image reveals just how unhinged the vociferous anti-smoking lobby has become," David McAdam, the visitor who first noticed that the PM had posthumously kicked his taste for tobacco, told the Daily Mail. "So much for the notion that only communist tyrants airbrushed history."

Museum manager John Welsh denied having anything to do with the edit. He said that he didn't notice the missing cigar until McAdam approached his staff.

"We've got all sorts of images in the museum, some with cigars and some without," Welsh told the paper. "We've even got wartime adverts for cigarettes in the lift down to the air raid shelter, so we wouldn't have asked for there to be no cigar." He refused to reveal who originally turned the photo into a poster for the museum, and presumably removed the cigar.

But Churchill isn't the first famous smoker to have his nicotine fix retrospectively nixed. Here's a pack of puffers whose acts of inhaling have also been consigned to the ashtray of history:

Paul McCartney
Peer closely at the original artwork of the Beatles' "Abbey Road" LP and you might just notice that a barefoot Macca is clutching a cigarette in his right hand. That tiny smoke was too much for U.S. print giant Allposters, who in 2003 demanded that the butt be digitally removed. Beatles publisher Apple Records later protested, telling the BBC, "We have never agreed to anything like this."

Bette Davis
In 2008, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in honor of the sultry starlet, based on a still from 1950's "All About Eve." But the hand-painted portrait left out an important detail featured in the original image: a tobacco stick the actress had been elegantly holding in her hand.

And if there was anything Davis was known for in Hollywood -- OK, apart from that -- it was her incessant smoking. "I've been close to Bette Davis for 38 years," quipped Henry Fonda at a 1979 roast of the actress, "and I have the cigarette burns to prove it."

Jean-Paul Sartre
Once asked by a Newsweek journalist to list the important things in his life, the grumpy French philosopher replied, "I don't know. Everything. Living. Smoking." But a 2005 celebration of the existentialist's life at Paris' National Library couldn't show the philosopher indulging in his favorite activity, in case it broke tough tobacco advertising laws.

As there are few photos of Sartre not smoking -- he polished off two packs of cigarettes and two tobacco-stuffed pipes a day -- the library was forced to edit out the philosopher's Gauloise in a 1946 shot.

Clement Hurd
A portrait of the famed illustrator clutching a cigarette appeared in the back of the classic children's book "Goodnight Moon" for some 20 years. But in 1995, Kate Jackson -- then editor-in-chief of publisher HarperCollins -- spotted the cancer causer and had it smudged out. "It is potentially a harmful message to very young kids," Jackson told The New York Times, "and it doesn't need to be there."

That act of censorship outraged some long-standing "Goodnight" fans, who demanded the photo be restored to its smoky glory. Hurd's son, though, said the illustrator -- who died in 1988 -- wouldn't have been too bothered, as he'd kicked the habit in the 1950s and "really disliked smoking later in life."