Of All the Gin Joints
Page 11
The following week, Crosby arrived in court for a hearing. He had come straight from the golf course, sporting green pants and a loud orange sweater, and the judge was not amused. When Crosby admitted he’d had a couple of drinks prior to the wreck, the judge asked the arrogant kid if he was aware of this thing called the Eighteenth Amendment—the part of the Bill of Rights that enacted Prohibition?
“Yes,” Crosby replied. “But no one pays much attention to it.”
Crosby was sentenced to sixty days in jail, of which he served forty. By then Whiteman had long since replaced him on “Song of the Dawn” and, citing an unpaid bootlegger’s bill and the DUI incident, the bandleader would fire him a few weeks after his release.
Years later, when Crosby told the DUI story himself, he spun the disappointment as a blessing. “My crooning style wouldn’t have been very good” for the song in the film, he said. “I might have flopped. I might have been cut out of the picture. I might never have been given another crack at a song in any picture.” The fact that he gave up heavy drinking soon thereafter argues that he actually may have felt otherwise.
DON THE BEACHCOMBER
1722 N. MCCADDEN PL.
IF EMPEROR MICHAEL ROMANOFF had it right, the more fun the proprietor, the more fun the venue. And, if nothing else, Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt sounds like he was fun. As a young man, Gantt spent years knocking around Australia, Papua New Guina, Jamaica, and Tahiti. During his travels he gathered experience, collected cool artifacts and developed a strong taste for rum.
Gantt drifted back to the States at the tail end of Prohibition. In 1934 he rented an old tailor shop just north of Hollywood Boulevard and opened a bar. Calling it Don’s Beachcomber Café, the place was fairly simple: about two dozen seats, Gantt’s artifacts scattered about, and the names of cocktails carved into a plank above the bar. It would be America’s very first Tiki bar. And if the décor was simple, the cocktails were not.
At the time, everyone pretty much drank gin or whiskey; it was a martini or Manhattan world. Gantt would introduce rum (dark rum, light rum, gold rum, spiced rum) or at least bring it into vogue. In doing so, he would go down in history as the inventor of the tropical drink. Not a bad credit to your name, but then Gantt’s name, along with his bar’s, was changing. So popular was the tiki craze that in 1937 Don’s moved across the street. There, Gantt renamed it Don the Beachcomber and renamed himself Donn Beach. Now you can tell that this guy was fun.
Gantt famously said, “If you can’t get to paradise, I’ll bring it to you.” The expanded new location resembled an island getaway with palm fronds and Polynesian masks; there were Philipino waiters serving “exotic” dishes (really just standard Chinese fare) in dimly lit rooms with names such as the Cannibal Room and the Black Hole of Calcutta. Of course, there were also the wildly inventive tiki drinks, with equally inventive names: Zombie, Missionary’s Downfall, Cobra’s Fang, and the PiYi, delivered in a miniature pinapple. They were fruity but strong: The Zombie featured three shots of different rums and could make you feel like “the walking dead.” So much so, Gantt was soon forced to impose a two-Zombie limit per customer.
Don the Beachcomber fast became a celebrity hotspot, with patrons like Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, David Niven, Buster Keaton, and Frank Sinatra. Stars were even given personalized ivory chopsticks stored in a special case. The tiki craze would sweep the nation, inspiring hordes of imitators. In 1937, Victor Bergeron returned to the San Francisco Bay area from travels in the South Seas to open the first Trader Vic’s. And while Gantt would invent the Zombie, Vic would lay claim to the Mai Tai. It was the beginning of a friendly rivalry.
With the onset of World War II, Gantt went off to fight in Europe. During his time away, his ex-wife Sunny expanded Don the Beachcomber into a chain of Beachcombers. And while none of the original restaurants remain today, at one time there were sixteen. Upon Gantt’s return, the couple split up assets, Sunny keeping the mainland U.S. locations and Gantt moving to Hawaii. There he would start over again on the burgeoning Waikiki Beach with his own unaffiliated Don the Beachcomber. For the remainder of his life, Gantt would serve delicious rum concoctions to bikiniclad customers thirsty from the sun. How fun is that? He died with eighty-four cocktail recipes to his name.
ZOMBIE
1 OZ. FRESH LEMON JUICE
1 TSP. BROWN SUGAR
1 OZ. GOLD PUERTO RICAN RUM
1 OZ. LIGHT PUERTO RICAN RUM
1 OZ. 151 DEMERARA RUM
1 OZ. UNSWEETENED PINEAPPLE JUICE
1 OZ. FRESH LIME JUICE
1 OZ. PASSION-FRUIT SYRUP
1 DASH OF ANGOSTURA BITTERS
1 MINT SPRIG
Dissolve brown sugar in lemon juice at the bottom of a shaker. Add ice cubes and pour in remaining liquid ingredients. Shake well and strain into Collins glass filled with crushed ice.
Garnish with mint. Serve with a straw.
MISSIONARY’S DOWNFALL
1 OZ. LIGHT RUM
½ OZ. PEACH BRANDY
1 OZ. HONEY SYRUP*
½ OZ. FRESH LIME JUICE
¼ CUP DICED FRESH PINEAPPLE
¼ CUP MINT LEAVES
¾ CUP CRUSHED ICE
1 MINT SPRIG
Put all of the ingredients into the blender and blend at highest speed for 15–30 seconds. Pour into a goblet or, as substitute, a Collins glass.
*Honey syrup: The same process as simple syrup, with 1 part honey to 1 part water.
FRANCES FARMER
1913–1970
ACTRESS
“I put liquor in my milk, in my coffee, and in my orange juice. What do you want me to do, starve to death?”
Beautiful and troubled, Frances Farmer had a career that derailed not long after leaving the station. A precocious girl, she won a national essay contest in high school for a piece titled “God Dies.” Farmer provoked further controversy in college with a publicized trip to the Soviet Union in 1935, when she visited the Moscow Art Theatre. Signed by a Paramount talent scout soon after, she despised Hollywood from the start and constantly bucked against the studio. Nonetheless, Farmer managed to get cast opposite major stars such as Bing Crosby, Tyrone Power, and Fred MacMurray; her finest moment was a double role in Howard Hawks’s Come and Get It (1936); Hawks declared her “the greatest actress I’ve ever worked with.” A failed marriage to actor Leif Erickson and professional frustrations led to increasingly erratic behavior; she was arrested for drunk driving in 1942 and for assault in 1943. The latter resulted in an involuntary commitment to a mental hospital, which led to seven years shuttling in and out of institutions. (Her mother recommitted her in 1945.) The 1982 biopic Frances depicts Farmer getting a lobotomy, but the scene was entirely fictional and all records show that she never underwent the procedure. Her final years were spent in Indianapolis, hosting Frances Farmer Presents, a weekday movie showcase.
HAVE YOU EVER HAD a broken heart?” The stunningly beautiful Frances Farmer was shouting after her recent arrest—her second in four months, to be exact. The first was on a charge of drunk driving; she’d been fined $500 and placed on probation. The second, in January 1943, was a bit messier. For one thing, nobody could say exactly what had happened. Farmer certainly couldn’t—she had been drinking far too much. Witnesses alleged she’d started a brawl in a restaurant and then run topless along Sunset Boulevard. Added to that, she hadn’t checked in with her probation officer, and the police had been looking for her for the last two weeks. When they finally found her, at the Knickerbocker Hotel, she did not go quietly.
At the police station, when asked her occupation, Farmer answered “cocksucker.”
Farmer’s six-year marriage to actor Leif Erickson had recently ended, but if her heart was indeed broken, there had been a number of wrecking balls. A few years prior, while playing Lorna Moon in a Group Theatre production of Golden Boy in New York, she had an affair with playwright Clifford Odets. Odets would later turn to screenwr
iting (Sweet Smell of Success) and name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The thing was, both Farmer and Odets were married to other people at the time, and Odets refused to leave his wife. Eventually, it would be Farmer he left—left feeling used and betrayed. It was then that problems with her temper and alcohol began to spiral out of control.
* * *
Witnesses alleged she’d started a brawl in a restaurant and then run topless along Sunset Boulevard. Added to that, she hadn’t checked in with her probation officer, and the police had been looking for her for the last two weeks.
* * *
In a Los Angeles courtroom on the morning after her second arrest, the presiding judge asked Farmer a few basic questions about what had transpired the day before. Had she been fighting? Yes, Farmer replied, she had. “For my country as well as myself.” Had she been driving a car (a violation of her parole)? No, Farmer replied. “But only because I couldn’t get my hands on one.”
After a series of such replies, the judge sentenced Farmer to 180 days in jail, which was commuted to a court-ordered commitment to a mental hospital. She left the courtroom and asked a police matron if she could use a phone. When told she couldn’t, Farmer punched the matron. Police had to put her in a straitjacket to get her to a cell. As they dragged her away, both from the courthouse and from Hollywood forever, Farmer tried to explain herself. “Have you ever had a broken heart?”
WILLIAM FAULKNER
1897–1962
AUTHOR AND SCREENWRITER
“Isn’t anythin’ Ah got whiskey won’t cure.”
Considered America’s preeminent Southern writer (many feel the qualifier could be dropped), William Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi. As a young man, his neighbors nicknamed him “Count No ‘Count” because they reckoned he didn’t have a steady job. Setting most of his novels in the surrounding area, his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, between the years of 1928 and 1941 Faulkner would write ten novels—including his masterpieces The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and ending with perhaps his last work of distinction, Go Down, Moses. It was a feat of astonishing creative output, unmatched in American literature before or since, and made even more astonishing by the fact that, following the publication of Faulkner’s fifth novel, Sanctuary, he would make intermittent trips to Hollywood, working at first for MGM, then Twentieth Century–Fox and later Warner Bros. Much more important than the studios was his lifelong collaborative friendship with director Howard Hawks. Faulkner’s most important films were To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), both adaptations directed by Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart. In 1949, after decades of financial instability, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and thereafter became an international celebrity.
WILLIAM FAULKNER PUT A good deal of faith in bourbon. In addition to its medicinal benefits, bourbon, he felt, provided creative benefits, too: “I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach.”
Although writers are generally known to knock it back, few of them actually drink while they write. Hemingway made it a point to keep his drinking separate, saying “[I] have spent … all my life drinking, but since writing is my true love I never get the two mixed up.” Eugene O’Neill, who drank everything from wood alcohol to absinthe to his own urine (this on a binge in Provincetown), declared, “I never write a line when I’m not strictly on the wagon.” Raymond Carver, who also knew how to bend an elbow, confessed he “never wrote so much as a line that was worth a nickel when I was under the influence.”
Faulkner, it seems, was the exception. But then given his feelings about Hollywood and the amount of time he would be forced to spend there (four years total), maybe that was understandable. Hailing from Oxford, Mississippi, he didn’t like Los Angeles, “that damned West Coast place.” He didn’t like the film business, that “place that lacks ideas.” And he didn’t like screenwriting, “It ain’t my racket.” But by 1932 sales of his first four novels (including The Sound and the Fury) had averaged only two thousand copies each, and so off to Hollywood he went.
* * *
Picture a small man wearing worn but neatly pressed tweeds with a pipe between his teeth. Faulkner didn’t belong on a studio lot and he knew it.
* * *
Picture a small man wearing worn but neatly pressed tweeds with a pipe between his teeth. Faulkner didn’t belong on a studio lot and he knew it. He knew it so clearly that he fled almost immediately upon arriving, running in panic from the MGM offices out into the scorched and desolate wasteland that is Death Valley. (How about that?!) He returned a few days later, but is it any wonder he kept his whiskey close?
What made doing that that much easier was, first, by the time Faulkner arrived in Hollywood his abiding passion for alcohol was already well known and, second, Faulkner didn’t care a whit about keeping his drinking a secret. A perfect example is the time Faulkner began work on the screenplay The Road to Glory for director Howard Hawks. This was at Twentieth Century–Fox, and one of the producers was the highly respected Nunnally Johnson (Grapes of Wrath, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit). Soon after arriving at Johnson’s office for what was to be the very first script meeting, Faulkner pulled a pint of bourbon from his pocket. Unfortunately, the bottle happened to be sealed with heavy tinfoil and Faulkner, in his eagerness to uncork it, sliced his finger. He started to bleed. Not to be dissuaded, Faulkner began to suck on the wounded finger while he continued to open the bottle. Having accomplished that, Faulkner sat down with one hand dripping blood (some say over a wastebasket, others into his own hat) and the other hand swigging whiskey. Then the work began. It was 1936.
Almost a decade later, Faulkner would find himself back in Hollywood, again writing for Hawks, though now at Warner Bros. This time, taking a page out of W. C. Fields’s playbook, Faulkner employed a different strategy for getting through the workday. He hired a male nurse, named Mr. Nielson, to accompany him around the lot. Carrying a bottle in a black doctor’s satchel, Mr. Nielson would ration out drinks of whiskey and Faulkner would write. In fact, over the next two years at Warners, he would write The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not.
Maybe his faith in bourbon was well placed.
LIKE MANY WRITERS, William Faulkner felt little affection for Hollywood. After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and, consequently, leaving Tinseltown town for good, he would say, “I have never learned how to write movies, nor even to take them seriously.”
There is one story about him working for director Howard Hawks and suffering from mal de Hollywood. He asked Hawks if he might write from home, as opposed to the studio lot where, in those days, screenwriters actually wrote. Hawks agreed, but after a number of days had passed, the studio called to check on Faulkner. Nobody answered. Apparently, by home, the novelist had meant two-thousand miles away in Mississippi. Faulkner was back in Oxford eating watermelon on the porch and watching the rain.
Still, whenever he was in Hollywood, his favorite watering hole was Musso & Frank’s. Known for their martinis, they let Faulkner behind the bar to mix his own beloved Mint Juleps. That recipe, if ever known, has been swallowed up by time. But one can only imagine that to Faulkner, at least, it tasted like home.
MINT JULEP
3 OZ. BOURBON
½ OZ. SIMPLE SYRUP
7 MINT SPRIGS
Crush six mint sprigs in the bottom of a chilled Old-Fashioned glass. Pour in simple syrup and bourbon. Fill with crushed ice and stir. Garnish with the remaining mint sprig and serve with two short straws. Add a splash of club soda if you like.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
1896–1940
AUTHOR AND SCREENWRITER
“I cannot consider one pint of wine at the day’s end as anything but one of the rights of man.”
He was the preeminent chronicler of the Jazz Age, a term F. Scott Fitzgerald coined and the period for which he became a symbol. Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise,
based on a book he had begun at Princeton, made him an instant success. Next came The Beautiful and the Damned, followed by his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, considered one of the greatest American novels ever written. The book has been adapted to screen no less than five times, ranging from a 1926 silent film (now lost) to a 2013 3D version. Living in Paris during the 1920s with his wife, Zelda, Fitzgerald was at the heart of the Lost Generation and, even amongst the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos, the celebrity couple stood out. But Fitzgerald’s fourth novel Tender Is the Night would take more than eight years to complete. By then, the stock market had crashed and the book was a disappointment to the cash-strapped Fitzgerald. He made several forays into screenwriting, often in the employ of MGM. But despite considerable time and effort, the great American author found little success in Hollywood. Most of Fitzgerald’s contributions, including some work on Gone with the Wind (1939), did not receive a credit. He would earn only one screenplay credit (shared), for the film Three Comrades, in 1938. But Fitzgerald poured his Hollywood experiences into his final novel, The Last Tycoon, published posthumously and based on MGM’s famed executive Irving Thalberg.
FITZGERALD NEVER LOVED HOLLYWOOD, though in truth, the feeling seems to have been mutual—at least where the studios were concerned. Naturally, for any serious East Coast writer, movie work held above all else the allure of easy money. But Fitzgerald, more than most, took a serious interest in the screenwriting craft. His colleague Ben Hecht (the “Shakespeare of Hollywood”) once observed, “It’s just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. But the view is different.” And indeed, most of Fitzgerald’s time in the California sunshine was marked by struggle.