A recent brief stay in the storied precincts of New Orleans confirms the legend that this is still the source and fountainhead, in so far as the United States is concerned, of the easy, casual good life and that, of all the various communities celebrated for their public restaurants, New Orleans alone has survived the follies and fancied urgencies of wartime with something closely resembling a characteristic public cuisine. Good eating and drinking in the Louisiana metropolis, what is more, are not confined to restaurants in the grand manner, although, more than in most other communities, these justify their perennial celebrity. It is possible for the stand-up luncher in the oyster bars of St. Charles Avenue or across Canal Street in the Vieux Carré to satisfy himself for forty or fifty cents with fare which in, say, New York would be unobtainable save in formal restaurants and at approximately ten times the price.
This is the record even in the face of this department's long-considered opinion that San Francisco is the most splendid of all cities, and that its opportunities for the gratification of the senses, generally, are second to none. The fact must stand that the little Bohemian restaurants of the San Francisco of the Ambrose Bierce era had disappeared almost in their entirety before the wars, and that the military occupation of the town during the shooting completely removed the last vestigial trace of fine food and drink in the casual, personal-restaurant manner of the legend. Dining in the grand manner is still emphatically possible amidst the gilded and orchidaceous galleries of the incomparable Palace Hotel. The Palace's sand dabs, champagne cellars, and its great house dessert, petits cocurs à la crème flottants aux fraises, are still the wonder and glory of the West Coast, but the tradition of food and drink in less magnificent places has sadly declined. Indeed, at a recent Sunday morning breakfast at no less a premises than the long-established Cliff House, the management undertook to convince this department that the customer should pay for a bottle of admittedly flat and impotable champagne, and only the prompt arbitrament of an old-time waiter and his unhesitating rebuke of his own employer prevented what might have been a regrettable contretemps. When the management of a San Francisco restaurant of standing undertakes to refuse the replacement of corked wine, there is something very wrong indeed afoot.
But, to return to New Orleans, where managements such as that of Count Arnaud's Restaurant are reluctant to let their friends pay for even the best conditioned magnums of the finest of wines, the entire pattern of food and drink here seems to have escaped the high-pressure treatment of customers which has been achieved elsewhere in the United States as a result of inflation and easy money. The prices at Arnaud's have not advanced appreciably over those of two years ago, the service in his various apartments is the nearest thing to perfection south of Henri Soulé, and Arnaud's crayfish bisque is still, unhesitatingly and without exception, the most distinguished single culinary preparation in America. It ranks with the crème Waterbury at the Colony, steak Diane at Jack and Charlie's, the crêpes Louise at Ernie Byfield's Pump Room, and the little thin hot cakes with ham steak on the breakfast menu of Wild Bill Kruthy's diner on the City of San Francisco. Beyond this gustatory accolade, this department cannot venture.
The wicked and charming Count Arnaud (his last name is Cazanave but nobody in New Orleans bothers) is himself probably the most glamorous and colorful character of the community, widowed now of the presence of Lyle Saxon. Arnaud, who is the greatest wine-opener alive outside of the Stork Club, and who will himself sit down with his most capacious customers and drink bottle for bottle with them while the champagne is flowing, prefers his private drink, a slug of fine bourbon in a cup of black coffee, and his personal waiter stands with his arrangement immediately at hand throughout the business day. A holdover from a more wide-open era in New Orleans, Arnaud is a sly raconteur, a courtly host, and a perceptive gourmet; in short, perfection in a restaurateur.
It doesn't take the detailed and documented reporting of such expert scouts and amateurs of the preposterous as Ludwig Bemelmans to indicate that, however big a green pea he may have been when voyaging in Europe in the past, the American who now attempts to travel in Europe generally and in France specifically is the Gnome-Rhone-Jupiter Whirlwind, super de luxe sucker of all time. The shellacking he took from the coney-catchers and boob-trappers in the naïve old Joe Zelli days when twenty-franc champagne was poured over him in Niagaras at a mere thousand francs a bottle is now regarded by the French with reminiscent wonder and amazement at the limits they placed on their own cupidity in those spacious times. They are well aware that the American tourist of 1947 has been warned at home of what he may expect in the way of hotel reservations and restaurant courtesy and that, if he is still wishful of being rolled in the grand manner, he is very much an addict of folly and should be accommodated the whole way.
Now this is all very well in the homeland, and if Europeans generally want their part of the world to become known as Robber's Roost while Bermuda, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean ports, and Latin America generally are falling over themselves to make their pleasant countries attractive on a something less than ransom basis, let Europe do as it very well pleases.
However, the reappearance of French export products, notably French vintages and French table specialties, might well be a signal for local rejoicing were it not for the circumstance that their prices suggest the confirmed belief in France that once a sucker, anywhere a sucker, and that an American belle poire can be trimmed just as thoroughly three thousand miles away if he hasn't got time to come to Europe. Champagne at ＄120 a case, which formerly sold for ＄45, and Strasbourg foie gras, at ＄16 a pound, which once sold at a dime an ounce; may find a few buyers among the, fortunately, already decreasing war-happy spendthrifts of the easy-going U. S., but it won't work long. There are many and often adequate substitutes for the food and wine products which have formerly been a French monopoly. Their quality is constantly improving, a taste and market for them are being universally promoted and enlarged, and their prices, instead of being inflated, are, with gratifying consistency, being lowered all the time. Almost anyone can tell you that ＄8 a bottle is too much for a mediocre table claret. A Yankee wouldn't pay that for a bottle of bonded bourbon, and it would be a good thing if he promoted the idea that other Yankees won't do it for a fifth-gallon of Château Déplorable, nonvintage, or not very long anyway.
If there is any one foolproof generality to be evolved from the record of the Broadway theater season to date, it is that the cash customers will fight with almost the same grim and determined ferocity to avoid attending meaningful and significant plays that they will to achieve admission to the most fanciful and ephemeral escapist entertainment. With this unusual qualification: that the escapism be expressed with intelligence and presented for persons of adult sophistication and circumstances in life. Here is no ready market for farce of the Up in Mabel's Room genre, but audiences have packed to overflowing the two houses at which rich and rewarding revivals of Oscar Wilde are playing, while they gave the quickest sort of brusheroo to a conscientious revival of Yellow Jack and, as this is being written, are only barely supporting All Your Sons with the critics riding herd on their flanks and shouting rah and olé in the interest of a rather dreary evening for no better reason than that it represents what passes for “serious drama.”
All Your Sons, in point of fact, stands as an excellent example of the morbid and wholly improbable theatrics devoted to the pondering of moral values which enchants the vast majority of play-reviewers and whose plugging and incessant recommendation serve to discredit these aisle-seat custodians of the general taste. Not, in all fairness, that the reporters did not almost unanimously cheer and smash their hats for both Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, because they did, and in so doing showed both their good sense and their discretion. But it is a safe bet that many of them did it under inner protest and in the simple knowledge that not to applaud what so patently had taken the public fancy would make them superlatively ridiculous.
The truth of the matter is, of course, that the professional critic of the theater is a serious-minded and intellectually pretentious reporter who, if his first city editor hadn't assigned him to cover the opening performance of the Ben Greet Players at the local Oddfellows' Hall, would, ten to one, have become a labor reporter or otherwise concerned for significant and phony causes. It is only with reluctance that he lends the dignity of his qualified approbation to anything so frivolous and unsignificant as mere entertainment, an attitude toward the pleasures of the theater which he consistently maintains by the evolution of a wholly synthetic tradition that play-reviewers never applaud a performance by laughing or clapping for the actors and never, if they can avoid it, wear evening clothes, regarding formal dress as a sign of frivolous disposition and almost the equivalent of having a good time.
Charity will readily suggest that the occupation of being a play-reviewer is not in itself conducive to a merry outlook on life, and it is possible that being forced to view an annual succession of significant and meaningful plays may even nourish a corrupt and macabre taste. To the healthy disposition, this is certainly true of such plays as All Your Sons. Simply it is more the pity that persons of integrity; which the New York reviewers most assuredly are, and of taste and perception, which most of them are outside of the theater, should be possessed of the preposterous notion that any play mentioning world policy, no matter how stupid or bathetic its contriving, must per se be considered a fine thing, while a play concerning itself with good manners, agreeable conversation, and staffed with butlers is hardly worth their educated consideration. Year after year the box office cannot instruct them to the contrary.
It has been very much the vogue during the past several seasons, and even the usually sapient George Jean Nathan has upon occasion fallen in with the fashion, to forecast the practically immediate elimination of serious ballet from legitimate theater entertainment and its relegation to the specialized stage and concert hall. No sooner had ballet achieved its enormous vogue through the agency of Agnes De Mille's arrangements for Oklahoma! than it was almost universally modish to say that the whole thing was only temporary and that, by next season at the latest, ballet as a dominant part of the score would have vanished entirely from the Broadway scene.
The 1947 contribution to the infallibility of Broadway seers in this particular matter and field of prophesy comes in the form of a new and overwhelmingly acclaimed musical at the Ziegfeld Theater called Brigadoon in which a series of ballets directed by this same Miss De Mille not only completely dominate the evening, but very nearly run such incidental interludes as may be provided by individual actors off the stage entirely. Brigadoon is conceived in mystic vein and is seldom light, let alone hilarious, but it has Manhattan by the heels and does it through the agency of ballet piled on ballet.
The public may, as the wise money has said for the past five years, be tired to death of ballet and unwilling to support any show with ballet in it, but the public certainly has an odd way of proving it. If the public, on this basis, should continue to grow increasingly bored with ballet, the most profitable thing for a producer to do next year will be to eliminate all actors and singers whatsoever from his cast and present pure ballet and nothing else.
Shirtcuff Jottings:
- The Plaza Hotel, New York's citadel of Edwardian good living and upholstered bon ton, is planning to celebrate its fortieth anniversary in October, and plans are being drawn up by Serge Obolensky for a full week of fiesta and promotional gala with national publicity and appropriate hurrah.
- The other Plaza note of the moment is the return in the capacity of managing director of Frank Wangeman from his two-year tour of duty at the Town House in Los Angeles, another outpost of the ever-crescent Hilton Hotel circuit.
- The spring list of E. P. Dutton announces the publication of Champagne Cholly, a biography of the late, great Maury Paul, last of the important society editors, by his onetime assistant, Eve Brown.
- Miss Brown was in Paul's most intimate confidence, and most of the town's uppercase names are mentioned so that the book is certain in advance of a degree of success and may be sensational.
- Snootiest of the new shops bidding for the boulevardier trade is Bronzoni, Ltd., which manufactures to order nothing but house robes and lounging pyjamas from fabrics designed by Brooke Cadwallader.
- Odd McIntyre, who collected bathrobes as some people collect stamps, would have liked it.
- The member chevaliers of the very exclusive Confrèrie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, the top-flight tong of muffin-munchers and vintage-sniffers, again have their own bottling of a celebrated Burgundy: Clos de Vougeot 1937. Not many individuals or organizations have their privately bottled wines in these shabby times.