When Cigars Are This Good, There’s No Reason to Fume : Culture: The annual smoker at the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point features shameless indulgence in fine company, fine food and--above all--fine stogies.

DANA POINT —  Hey, it’s a guy thing.

Actually, it’s the ultimate guy thing:

Slightly more than a hundred gents in tuxedos, all sitting at one 40-yard-long table, turning the air blue not with rowdy stories (although there were a few), but with smoke from some of the best cigars you can clamp your teeth around. And Milton Berle, waving a stogie the size of a Scud missile, bending off gags that were dusty when Havanas were still legal. And enough prime, A-1 chow to put a healthy crimp in your cummerbund. And the kind of poetic liquid accompaniment that can turn Al Bundy into Rex Harrison.

Why can’t life be like the annual smoker at the Ritz-Carlton?

Ah, well, one can only take so much startlingly tender filet de boeuf , ingest just so much Ossetra caviar with corn and buckwheat blinis, lovingly swallow just so much delicate consomme and New Zealand gooseberry sorbet and Reine de Saba in pistachio sauce and Spanish red prawns with Atlantic scallops in aquavit-and-cream sauce, sip just so much 10-year-old Quinta do Noval tawny port and Krug Grand Cuvee champagne and Louis XIII cognac and Macallan single malt Scotch, luxuriate in just so much fragrant haze from smokes that make most cigars smell like burning brake linings.

Yes, it would be hell.

But the black-tie boys at the third annual gentlemen’s cigar smoker at the Ritz-Carlton here last Thursday were a game bunch and managed to muddle through. Many of them, like Joe De Franco of Corona del Mar, president and chief executive officer of a hazardous waste treatment business, had the advantage of attending the first two smokers and knew what they were in for.

De Franco, who has an abiding passion for cigars and sartorial quirks, arrived with stogies jutting from his coat pocket and a proper bowler on his head--which may have been the only way to make a true fashion statement at an all-black tie dinner. He bought the hat, he said, on a shopping trip in London with John Wayne while Wayne was shooting on location for “Brannigan.”

“Duke just said, ‘Hey, let’s go and get a couple of bowlers,’ ” said De Franco. “We even bought one for Pilar, too.”

Pilar Wayne, the Duke’s widow, was at the smoker, too, sans bowler. She was one of five women who managed to wheedle their way into the male enclave--the others included a journalist, the wife of a tobacconist, and two women who got on the guest list by providing male names. Wayne, however, attended last year’s bash as the guest of the Ritz-Carlton’s general manager Henry Schielein--as she did this year--and appears to be in serious danger of enjoying herself, even though she professes to hate cigar smoke.

Most of the guests, however, think cigar smoke is at least on a par with anything the Chanel people put out. Take Rick Hacker, for instance. A Beverly Hills author who writes extensively about pipes and cigars, Hacker just laughed when someone reflexively apologized for blowing a cloud of Macanudo smoke in his direction.

“Don’t apologize!” he said, finishing his pipe before moving on to the cigars. “I love that smell.”

And the smell was in the air from the very beginning of the evening: a reception in and around one of the hotel’s smaller meeting rooms overlooking the ocean, where the first champagne was sipped, the first steak tartar and caviar were served and the first stubby before-dinner Davidoffs--provided by the company’s representative, Gerald Edelman--were fired up.

U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie clearly was pleased with the opportunity. A longtime aficionado, Rafeedie said he usually only gets to indulge his passion for the leaf in “my chambers, my car and my home. Fortunately, my wife likes the smell.”

At the end of the one-hour reception, the black-and-white bunch sat down in an adjacent--and much larger--room, at a long, long table laid on with geometric precision with gleaming glasses, plates and flatware, vases of red and yellow tulips, candelabra, and garlands with red roses, apples, oranges and grapes. A string quartet played against one wall in the middle of the room, and the waiters arrived and departed in platoons.

Berle called it “the Orange County reunion of the Last Supper.” Then, remembering Passover, he called it “a smoker’s Seder.”

The food, however, was decidedly French, the result, said Schielein, of chef Christian Rassinoux’s reproducing original recipes by the renowned chef Auguste Escoffier.

Schielein said the inflated guest list this year (he had promised last year to limit it to 80) was the result of “an awful lot of arm-twisting” among rabid cigar fans. But no more, he said.

“This is it, “ Schielein declared. “This is a five-star hotel, it’s not a convention hotel.”

He ended his welcoming speech with the unnecessary admonition, “Don’t take yourselves too seriously.”

Berle made sure of it. Unable to wrap his tongue around Schielein’s name, he adopted the handle “Mr. Shoeshine” instead. It stuck. During the obligatory group photograph, it wasn’t “cheese,” it was “SHOESHINE!”

Berle, puffing on a Temple Hall, said he had taken up cigar smoking at 13.

“That’s 70 years ago,” he said. “My doctor told me about 45 years ago to stop smoking cigars. He died.”

After hearing himself referred to as the second-most famous cigar smoker in Hollywood, he twitted George Burns ( numero uno ).

“I asked George Burns to come tonight, and he couldn’t make it because of the distance,” deadpanned Berle. “He’s in the lobby.”

It was past midnight when the assembly finally folded the napkins and trooped upstairs to the Library, a richly paneled and furnished room where a large oval table was laid on with more than 1,000 cigars, which the guests were invited to take home. Pockets bulged with booty.

“God,” said one delighted smoker, “this is like a candy store. It’s Cigars R Us.”

Finally, most smokers chose one of their finest, paired it with the liberally flowing cognac, Armagnac, port and Scotch, and sank blissfully into a chair.

And thought that maybe they could do this every day if they absolutely had to.