Most would agree the most famous nightclub in film history is Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca. The story is set almost entirely in a 1940s nightclub, Rick’s, run by Humphrey Bogart, in Morocco. To quote the Hollywood publicity tagline for the film: ‘They had a date with fate in Casablanca!’
For me, the nightclubs of those times were characterised by chance meetings and introductions. In Rick’s we have conspiratorial meetings, accidental reunions, life-changing introductions, arrests by the police, deals done, fates decided, money won and lost and falling in love – the most dramatic of all chance meetings. Sadly, no martinis are drunk in Casablanca.
To illustrate how acceptable public drinking of cocktails had become at this time, I quote from Mary McCarthy’s book The Group, set in 1930s America. McCarthy describes a scene in a hospital where a friend is sick: ‘… it was cocktail hour in Priss’s room at New York Hospital – terribly gay … Sloan dropped in every afternoon and shook up martinis for visitors … Mrs Hartshorn swallowed her martini in a single draft, like medicine: this was the style among advanced society women of her age … she refused a “dividend” from the silver shaker …’
The American drinking expression the dividend refers to the second or remaining part of a martini in the coctail shaker, which is usually watered down a little by the melting ice.
When Voltz and I were drinking a martini in the bar of the Downtown Association Club in Manhattan, of which I am a reciprocal member, the martinis were served in small individual jugs containing more than a full martini from which the waiter initially filled our glasses at our table. When we had finished our first martini, the waiter came over and asked us if we would ‘like the dividend’. We, of course, said yes, and he poured what was left in the jugs into our glasses – not quite a full second martini.
The cocktail hour, the pre-dinner drink – the civilised idea of ending the day with friends or family (if you can find either) and a drink; perhaps better described as ‘starting the night’ – seems to have begun in 16th Century Europe (who knows?) when people produced spirits flavoured with herbs and spices for medicinal purposes which included the stimulation of appetite (any old excuse). What was so wrong with their appetites in the 16th Century? I’m willing to bet that at some point – say, immediately? – the medicinal purpose was thoroughly abused or at least stretched. But every time I have a Campari, more than in any other drink, I taste 16th Century. I taste its medicine. And I take its medicine. The aperitif is a drink to stimulate the appetite but how it is supposed to do this has never been adequately explained to me. Perhaps it relaxes the stomach and the spirits after the stress of the day, or maybe it introduces some gentle enzymes into the stomach.
The early producers of the ‘medicinal’ aperitif made it more acceptable to the taste by diluting the ingredients in wine, vermouth being one of these. In France it is known as the apero and takes place usually at 7 pm, after the cinq-à-sept, the French expression for an afternoon meeting between lovers (what is sometimes known as the martini matinée). I don’t know whether any alcohol that afternoon lovers drink is considered an apero. In Italy it is called the aperitivo – both words come from the Latin word aperire, ‘to open’, as in open the bar.
Somewhere in the 1920s the martini became the prince of aperitifs.
The traditional French aperitifs are port and pastis and the Italian are vermouth or Campari. (Campari is a bitter Italian aperitif made of a blend of herbs and alcohol developed in 1860 by Sig. Gaspare Campari in Milan.) The English seem to begin earlier with Scotch, gin drinks, and Pimms. There is the American Happy Hour. I have had to point out to bartenders in the two-for-the-price-of-one Happy Hour bars that two martinis cannot acceptably be served to one person at the same time. The second martini will, of course, lose its chill and the queueing of drinks in front of one at a bar intimates excess of the lesser order. If there are two people, there is obviously no problem.
Voltz is adamant that in Manhattan when he was growing up, the cocktail hour began with the nightly news. One fetched a drink from the cocktail tray – his family did not have a trolley – and then went in to listen to the news. ‘You would take a drink so as to face and digest the news. I suppose it makes doing your civic duty more pleasant.’
He agreed that this rule only applied if you found yourself in the unfortunate position of being at home at the cocktail hour.
Quite early in my life I developed a taste for stylish bars and clubs away from the egalitarian public bar.
You cannot confidently order a martini in a public bar. That is asking too much of a public bar.
My friend the late Murray Sime, a lawyer and a senior vice president of Citigroup, always preferred the pub. He felt that there was a greater chance of meeting the unexpected in a pub. And he usually did.
Sometimes he quoted G.K. Chesterton, usually missing a line or two and rewriting others (and God knows where he dredged it up from).
… It is not true to say I frowned,
Or ran about the room and roared;
I might have simply sat and snored
I rose politely in the club
And said, ‘I feel a little bored.
Will someone take me to a pub?’
I do like a bar where I am likely to bump into old friends or acquaintances. I sometimes prefer the chance meeting to the arranged meeting and there are some people I prefer to meet by chance. I suppose that is what a warm acquaintance is.
Oh, I nearly forgot. The cocktail hour can be longer than an hour.
Liberating The Ritz
In 1944 Hemingway was covering the war in France for Colliers magazine. He heard that the Germans were retreating from Paris, so he armed himself with a Sten gun – a British lightweight sub-machine gun from S and T, the initials of the inventors’ surnames, Shepherd and Turpin – gathered together some ten French ‘irregulars’, and joined up with an American OSS (espionage) officer, Colonel David Bruce, who himself had about thirty men and some stray soldiers.
They set off into Paris, which was being liberated from the German army by American soldiers and French Resistance.
There was still some sniper fire, but most of the German soldiers had retreated.
Hemingway led the group to the Ritz Hotel, where he and Bruce had stayed before the war. The Germans who had been using the hotel as a base had fled and it was empty.
The manager of the hotel, M. Ausiello, recognised them and greeted them. M. Ausiello said to Hemingway, ‘Can I get you anything?’
Hemingway looked behind him at the men gathered there, and said, ‘How about seventy-three dry martinis?’
The manager and barman lined them up on the bar, and the group of soldiers and irregulars drank to the ‘liberation of the Ritz’.
There is no record of the proportions or ingredients of the martinis.
Hemingway took two prisoners, a couple of elderly German orderlies who had been left behind doing the laundry.
The Ritz commemorated this event by naming the bar Bar Hemingway. But when I was in Paris for the opening of the new Ritz bar last year along with Voltz and the usual riff and raff, I found there is some controversy about all this. There is the bar in which Hemingway drank as a regular – the Ritz bar – and the Bar Hemingway, which was the bar he ‘liberated’ on that day in 1944.
Voltz argues that to sense Hemingway, it is best to drink in the Ritz bar, despite the memorabilia in the Bar Hemingway.
I argue that the Ritz bar has been so extensively renovated that it is not really the same bar where Hemingway drank, and that it is difficult to sense Hemingway there now.
Voltz says, ‘And another thing. Did they drink the martinis as they were made or wait for all of them to be made before drinking them? If they waited, wouldn’t the seventy-three martinis have all been at vastly varied temperatures?’
I prefer not to discuss this with Voltz.
The First Martini Film
In 1928 there was a silent comedy made called Dry Martini d
irected by a person with the unlikely name of Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast. It is based on a book by John Thomas entitled Dry Martini: A Gentleman Turns to Love (1926).
A film historian says that d’Arrast directed films that were acclaimed for their wit, sophistication and smooth pacing, those things we associate with the martini, but the film Dry Martini, along with that first fashionable martini-drinking generation of the 1920s, is considered by archivists to be ‘lost’.
Legend has it that d’Arrast gave up movies to live off the roulette tables of Monte Carlo. Martini-drinking can lead to that sort of existence.
The book’s story is simple. The twenty-one-year-old daughter of a decadent American father who is living in Paris, turns up to visit her long-absent father, the legendary bon vivant, hoping to be taught decadence. The decadent father, not realising that this is what his daughter wants, sets out to teach her ‘respectability’ and puts on an act as a proper parent while she, disappointed by her now seemingly respectable father, has to set out to find decadence by herself.
I sent Thomas’s book to Voltz for his birthday.
The Role of the Martini in Movie-making
The last slate of the day on a movie set is sometimes called ‘the martini’.
A Martini Matinée
August Kleinzahler, in ‘Diary’, in the London Review of Books, 4 November 2004, has this note on the poet Thom Gunn: ‘Thom [Gunn] remembered him [Auden] going on at some length about martinis, what constituted a good one and where the best were to be found. This subject would have been of little or no interest to Thom then.
‘Although we were good friends for 23 years, our friendship reached its apotheosis [‘Does he mean “apogee”?’ Dr Anderson asked as we drank a martini in the Royal Automobile Club and examined this note by Kleinzahler] over the last few years of Thom’s life, after his retirement from teaching, in our martini matinées. The word matinée has an old-fashioned, low meaning as an “afternoon tryst”, but our martini matinées were only that: martinis at both ends of an afternoon movie.’
A few years earlier, in my black academic gown, I had gone to Thom Gunn’s memorial service at King’s College, Cambridge.
‘The Orchestra is Playing Yellow Cocktail Music …’
The cocktail hour also invites music and I love the piano bar, blues bars, and jazz bars. There is a genre of music called Lounge which is acceptable.
Murray Sime and I would often have crustless, quarter-cut lobster sandwiches at the old Menzies Hotel with our martinis while listening to the harpist.
Voltz usually says, ‘No music is good too.’
Yes, no music is good too.
‘Better none, than bad.’
Agreed.
Scott Fitzgerald wrote, ‘The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music … one of the Gypsies seizes a cocktail out of the air …’
My Birth Song (the song that was top of the hit parade on the day I was born – an idea dreamed up by Ian Van Tuyl) is ‘Moonlight Cocktail’ sung by Glenn Miller.
Couple of jiggers of moonlight and add a star,
Pour in the blue of a June night and one guitar,
Mix in a couple of dreamers and there you are:
Lovers hail the Moonlight Cocktail … dah dah dah …
Follow the simple directions and they will bring
Life of another complexion where you’ll be king.
Not true.
Canapés
At the cocktail hour, I love canapés and other hors d’oeuvres or what is now rather baldly called ‘bar food’. Hors d’oeuvres means literally ‘outside the main work’, outside the main meal.
Nuts are fine but should be eaten only once a month otherwise they become habitual and eaten without appreciation; likewise potato crisps – perhaps once every two months for potato crisps. Nuts and crisps must never be eaten from the packet but always put into dishes. It is not acceptable to fashion a crisp or nut packet into a dish shape, though in rougher bars it is sometimes inescapable. Knowledge of origami can be handy here.
Actually, you should never drink a martini in a bar that does not serve its nuts or crisps in bowls.
And never take handfuls – voracious grasps – of nuts from a bowl. Voltz says that it is OK to take a handful as long as you don’t put it in your mouth in one go. I disagree. No handfuls.
As my yogini says, we should eat slowly, concentrating on what it is we are eating, at least momentarily and from time to time, which means, according to her, that we eat each nut singularly and savour it. Taking one nut at a time from the bowl should be sufficient. If you are hungry, order a canapé.
I expounded to Voltz in the Yale Club Bar that as we eat our one peanut at a time, we should always spare a thought for the great distance it has travelled, and how it has been cared for by many hands: those that prepared the soil of the field in which it grew, those who planted the seeds of that peanut, the hands that irrigated it and cared for the growing plants, the hands that picked the peanut, the packers who put them in boxes, and the hands of the people who put them into packets as they came down the assembly line, the person who designed the packet, the people who manufactured the packet, the labellers of the packet, the truck loaders, the ship loaders, the waterside workers, the wholesalers who carefully stored the peanuts, the delivery people who carried the nuts to your particular bar, the shop assistants who arranged the packages on shelves, the food inspectors.
‘Isn’t this headed towards the finicky?’ Voltz asked.
As if Voltz would know where the boundary lies between finicky and plain living.
‘We can’t be too finicky, I think, about these matters. It’s a question of deliberation.’
Voltz grasped my arm and looked me in the eye. ‘You’re damned right. We can’t be too finicky in this world.’
Voltz is fond of saying that the world is going to hell in a handcart.
Of course, if you are pigging out, anything goes. I have pigged out. Go ahead, eat the whole bowl of nuts in two handfuls and drink the martini straight down and think nothing of the long line of people who brought these gifts to your mouth. But not every time.
The epicurian M.K. Fisher suggests ‘… generous, rich, salty Italian hors d’oeuvres: prosciutto, little chilled marinated shrimps, olives stuffed with anchovy, spice and pickled tomatoes …’
And of course the Spanish have tapas.
The hors d’oeuvres at the Bayswater Brasserie are, I consider, among the best I have ever found anywhere in the world, though some of the offerings are perhaps a little too robust for the cocktail hour.
– foie gras served with toast (foie gras is, of course, best eaten with Sauterne)
– oysters freshly shucked or in tempura (though I would never drink a martini with an oyster – a flinty dry Riesling or Sancerre or Chablis, Champagne or beer would be best with oysters)
– chickpea and flat bread (Turkish bread)
– salt and pepper squid
– prawn and pork gyoza
– salmon fish cakes
– mixed cheese and fruit and lavosh (though cheese for me still belongs after the main course – but go ahead, have it, I won’t say anything)
– hot potato chips with homemade chilli and tomato ketchup.
It is a pity they do not offer canapés. A canapé is somewhat smaller – bite size – and is created on a platform of bread; it is, after all, the French word for sofa – the toppings sit on the sofa of bread.
The canapé is usually about a centimetre thick, and can be shaped with a cutter into circles, oblongs, squares, triangles or other fancy shapes.
These portions of bread are sautéed in butter or used as bases for fresh combinations of lettuce, egg, ham, sardine, anchovy, lobster, crab, oyster.
I recently came across a recipe for the oyster sandwich from the early 20th Century: ‘Arrange fried oysters on crisp lettuce leaves, allowing two oysters for each leaf, and one leaf for
each sandwich. Prepare as other sandwiches.’
As a copyboy on the old Daily Telegraph it was one of my nightly jobs to go to a nearby restaurant and collect oyster sandwiches for the owner of the paper, Frank Packer, Kerry’s father. The oysters were out of a bottle and the sandwiches were made from white bread and butter.
I sometimes eat an oyster sandwich but my oysters are freshly shucked.
Sandwiches at cocktails should be crustless and cut into small triangles – or what my club calls a ‘six point’.
In the country town where I grew up my mother would serve cubed cheddar cheese and coloured pickled onions on tooth picks, which were displayed on holders made for displaying these delicacies. One of the holders she had was a small horse which I fancied. As a child I also enjoyed the leftovers from her afternoon parties. I suspect that is where I got my taste for hors d’oeuvres and, by extension, cocktails.
Scuba and Martini’s Law: L’ivresse des Grandes Profondeurs (Rapture of the Deep)
In the Leda Bar on the cruise ship Orion while in the Torres Strait, the biologist Len Zell told me about the international scuba-diving rule known as Martini’s Law.
He quoted Jacques Cousteau in The Silent World: ‘I am personally quite receptive to nitrogen rapture. I like it and fear it like doom – L’ivresse des Grandes Profondeurs has one salient advantage over alcohol: no hangover. If one is able to escape from its zone, the brain clears instantly and there are no horrors in the morning. I cannot read accounts of a record dive without wanting to ask the champion how drunk he was.’
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