UGH, THE SMELL OF IT

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I don't think there's much chance that Tupac Shakur's murder could have been the work of militant Christian vigilantes intent on rubbing out the most prominent corrupters of American youth. After all, nobody has taken a shot at Calvin Klein.

Producers whose movies have been denounced as degenerate by Bob Dole move freely about, often on their way to Democratic fund raisers. So do publishers who increased their bids on Dick Morris' book after the Star recorded his unfortunate foot fault. So do newspaper barons whose tabloids milked the Morris case for thousands of headlines, none of which, I feel compelled to point out, matched the one a London tabloid used several years ago to announce the sacking of a British Cabinet minister who, it was revealed, had similar sexual tastes: TOE JOB, NO JOB.

I single out Calvin Klein only partly because he seemed genuinely surprised last year when a number of people completely unconnected to the wacko right expressed the opinion that billboards featuring what appeared to be a selection of seventh-graders as sex objects might not be appropriate vehicles for selling blue jeans.

Klein came to mind more recently when Bob Dole denounced Trainspotting as one of the most contemptible movies, made by people who have no known connection to the Republican Party. The heroin addicts Trainspotting deals with look almost as depraved as the models in a 12-page ad Calvin Klein ran in the September issue of Vanity Fair.

When I first glanced at the characters pictured in that ad, I assumed that the product being advertised was some new type of methadone clinic. I expected the copy line to be something like "There is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless human being," or "We deal with worst-case scenarios." What Klein was trying to sell, it turned out, was a perfume called cK be, described as "the new fragrance for people."

After Dole criticized Trainspotting, it was pointed out that actually the movie shows some distinctly unromantic aspects of heroin addiction. Advertisements, on the other hand, are supposed to display people whose lives you'd like to emulate by buying the product. That is why those cigarette billboards show vibrant young people who have shiny white teeth and lungs that presumably bear no resemblance at all to a rusted-out tailpipe.

So, as a potential purchaser of cK be perfume, I was puzzled about how I was supposed to respond to pictures of skinny, tattooed street punks who look as if they're about to get a bad case of the shakes. What am I to think these people smell like? Could Calvin Klein really be under the impression that I want to smell the way they smell?

He could be. He certainly has a constitutionally protected right to act on that impression, even though the aroma strip on his Vanity Fair ad revived old thoughts about whether the Drafters could have envisioned the possibility that the freedom of expression guaranteed in the First Amendment would someday extend to smelling up the place.

I think Klein can be confident that nobody would try to scare him out of his rights. We live in an era, after all, in which Fatty Arbuckle's departure in disgrace from the film industry would be accompanied by a fat book contract and an arrangement with Hard Copy. Anyone tempted to knock off this society's leading corrupters simply wouldn't know where to begin.