There was a time when, of all the cities of the world, London was most conspicuously a man's town. London was a place created and maintained for masculine satisfactions, and its pattern of life was a background for an ordered and intelligent masculine society. Its streets were populated with men, each properly attired and identified with his proper class of society and place in the world. Unescorted women in polite public places were an exception. There were scores of wonderful shops which stocked and sold only items of masculine use, interest, or adornment. Bars were for men only, and many restaurants such as Simpson's at noontime resembled in their clientele nothing so much as gentlemen's clubs in Pall Mall. It was a well-ordered, leisurely, and, paradoxically, very gentle and mellow city, a place of impeccable manners and serenity. Going to the theater in the evening was a casual and unhurried business. After dark, gentlemen were dressed according to the company they kept, short jackets for masculine companions, tailcoats if ladies were present. Times were good, things were easy, and a Corona Corona cigar, in those days a cigar of breeding and consequence, cost, if memory serves, about thirty-five cents, although they were sixty cents in the United States.
Now, if the burden of returning voyagers is to be credited, London and indeed England have disappeared as places of consequence and seats of civilization. Shabby people are in politics, and shabby politics are reflected in a shabby way of life. The assurance, tranquillity, and desirable pattern of things have vanished, and England, embarrassed for its own poverty which isn't even genteel, advertises that it cannot accommodate tourists, and that the restaurants, concert halls, galleries, shops, and arcades that were once the most urbane and civilized in the world simply aren't what they used to be and, if the shabby people in authority at the moment have their way, never will be again.
What is England's tragic loss is, however, and in a somewhat oblique manner, New York's gain, for what with better times and better politics, Manhattan is assuming the role of the luxury capital of the world and, to a certain degree, of the Big Rock Candy Mountain of masculinity that London once was. Not that the serenity of West Brook Street on a spring evening can ever be recreated in Babylon-on-the-Hudson or that the style of living which made Claridge's and the Savoy the most beautiful restaurants in the world outside of Paris is likely to be reflected in any civilization as urgent as that of the United States. But New York is rolling in good times; its shops are beginning once more actually to have goods in stock, and, while a good 1941 vintage Cabana Largas cigar costs ninety cents at the Plaza, at least they are available.
As a man's town, too, Manhattan is not without its compensations. Happily, there are a few bars for men only: at the Plaza until after the Market closes, at the Ritz, the Biltmore, the Waldorf, and the St. Regis, and it would be a good thing if there were more and they ran on that basis twenty-four hours a day. There are wonderful men's shops such as Sulka's and McCrory's livid shirt foundry where the best-dressed men in the world, with England out of the picture, can drape themselves in five-hundred-dollar topcoats and satin bathrobes, and the Cub Room at the Stork is probably the choosiest celebrity club on earth for men and their lady friends.
Even in the field of the theater and with a singularly uninspired season behind it, New York has become the capital of the English-speaking theater world, and it is beyond any comparison the best and most imaginatively fed city of all. Its restaurants alone would occupy a pilgrimage of years' duration on the part of a pious gourmet, and it is a matter of debate whether Manhattan or Paris is the world center of feminine fashion.
While life in New York can probably never achieve the spacious style and grand manner of the classic of all great cities, San Francisco, since neither its tradition nor its geographic location can lay such a hold upon the imagination, it is still a place where the good life can be achieved in a very emphatic way. With the decline of Rome, the fine things of the world all drifted to Constantinople, and with the decay of London, New York has assumed a new vitality all its own.
While this department is usually content to leave the field of pure gastronomy and the aesthetics of dining to the various other entirely adequate agencies maintained by GOURMET, we recently had an experience which gave us, as the phrase goes, pause. We attended a semi-public dinner of some state and circumstance given at the Waldorf-Astoria with a good deal of gastronomic fanfare and costing the convives, as the menu elegantly designed the guests, a cool twenty-five dollars a cover. The three principal courses were formally listed on the menu as Le Pompano dans Son Braisage, Le Dindonneau de Saison, Sauce Prairiale, and Le Cochon de Lait, Enrobé en Sa Gelée. These magnificences when served turned out to be a composite of pompano filets, excellently broiled and seasoned and served in what might be termed an elegant fish hash; a fricassee of turkey; and with the salad, a thin slice of what is usually known as pork souse or head cheese, depending on one's regional vocabulary.
What this department is exercised by is not the rather pedestrian and commonplace fare masquerading under the magnificent pretensions of French culinary terminology, for this is an accepted and traditional devising of the haute cuisine and a rather pleasant way of dressing up and lending imagination to the menu. Indeed, there is a wholly enchanting imagery in describing pork souse as “milk-fed piglet, enrobed in his own jelly.” Nor is this department raising an eyebrow at the service by the Waldorf at a very fancy price of the component parts of the ＄1.75 house dinner in a less pretentious premises. That, too, is taken more or less for granted, and there were wines with the dinner which more nearly approximated justification of such expense.
What this department does take exception to is that here, at what might be termed a state dinner in one of the town's most pretentious and stately restaurants, every single course of importance was either a hash, a stew, or a ragout. Not a single course made its appearance uncarved, intact, and in the original dimensions intended by God and absolutely required at dinners possessed of any least claim at all upon style, circumstance, and propriety.
Save in the deepest extremities of wartime austerity, this department has never yet attended a dinner where at least the main course, were it red meat, did not make its appearance inviolate from the carving knife, at least for temporary purposes of display, or, if it were game birds, they did not come roast, broiled, or whatever, in their proper edible entirety. It has universally, too, been the custom at such festive times to select a fish of noble proportions, salmon, sturgeon, or other finny personalities of distinguished appearance to make their state entrance as the first substantial course of the meal.
Now, apparently, either the individuals charged with the arrangement of gustatory ceremonies are so indifferent to the appearance of their table or the banquet departments of our hotels are so avaricious as to fob off on even their most expensive customers such indifferent food that guests at state dinners find themselves splashing around in stews and ragouts complemented by thin slices of pork sausage. Could not the Waldorf, for one dinner at least, go to the effort of running up a few whole Canadian salmon, a half-dozen whole roast baby lambs, and serve a Kentucky ham with the salad? It would make a better impression on the guests.
To a theater season of almost incredible shabbiness and which produced no single new play of any distinction whatsoever with the vaguely possible exception of Miss Lillian Hellman's melodrama, Another Part of the Forest, John Gielgud's hilarious production of Love for Love put an elegant and satisfying period. Everything about this revival of Congreve's rather staggering and bawdy farce was just right. It was wittily spoken, delicately contrived, and sumptuously upholstered and, as a final panache to the season, the first-night audience embraced every resident member of Manhattan's glitter set socked to the teeth in their this-year's diamonds and premature suntans from the Atlantic Beach Club. As Mary Martin remarked during the intermission, the entire evening was a sort of command performance at court of something by Avery Hopwood and, indeed, there were moments when it all seemed very like Up in Mabel's Room done in knee breeches.
The internal dramatic economy of Congreve is nothing to be approached after even a reasonable dinner at Jack and Charlie's, but Mr. Gielgud's company of dressy mummers played up the script's broad aspects without being slapstick, and the fine Restoration bawdiness which contrived to get everyone concerned in bed with the wrong person at least once during the evening was accentuated without anything more than a fundamental vulgarity.
So far as it was possible to observe with Love for Love as a text, life in fashionable London in the reign of the Merry Monarch differed from life in fashionable New York at the current merry moment only by the presence of astrologers and gentlemen carrying muffs. Indeed it was impossible not to identify the various members of the cast with various Manhattan characters in the audience, which gave the play the double advantage of being at once bitchy and a classic. It is, of course, the veriest cliché to remark how “modern” an “old” play often appears in revival, but Love for Love amply demonstrates the circumstance, and the cliché must stand.
The success of Love for Love also demonstrated a number of aspects of the New York theater which are bound to be reflected in the productions of next season. It isn't at all probable that there will be any very comprehensive vogue for Congreve, since this costume foppery is esoteric stuff and not for general consumption, but it is one more weight in the balance for costume plays, revivals, and English importations. A season which found its two outstanding hits in revivals of comedies by Oscar Wilde finds its logical conclusion in Congreve, and when the best foot contemporary American talent can put forward is a dreary farrago of bathos called All My Sons, there is every reason to expect that next year will be even more English and revived.
But, whatever may transpire in the Broadway months to come, the last big first night of the season left a most pleasant taste in the memory of playgoers who had suffered most unreasonably through a season at best dull, pretentious, and essentially meretricious in character.
Shirtcuff Jottings:
- First of the long-distance overland railroad junkets since the wars was promoted jointly by the Seaboard Airline Railroad and the Budd Manufacturing Company which builds those beautiful streamlined, light-weight coaches in competition with Pullman Standard.
- Occasion was the Seaboard's gleaming new Silver Meteor on a twenty-four hour run between New York and Atlanta, and guests at the Birmingham end of the run were received with mayors, governors, bands, photographers, the powerful blessing of a bishop, and powerful hospitality in bottled form.
- Before the wars the golden-spike celebrations of the railroads were among the gaudiest of transcontinental promotion parties, and connoisseurs of such gilt-edge doings are welcoming their reappearance.
- Others that can be anticipated will be the Burlington's inaugural of its Chicago-San Francisco streamliners in conjunction with the Rio Grande and Western Pacific Railroads and the new Southern Railway's trains between New York and New Orleans.
- New Orleans and San Francisco are the two best-equipped cities in the land for municipal barn-raisings, from which aspect the railroads' press agents have a natural….
- Another sort of voiture commanding attention in the vicinage of Fifty-ninth Street is the rolling hot table bearing an enormous side of roast beef which is in use daily at noon in the Plaza Oak Room under the direction of the one and only Jules. The beef is the sole luncheon entree in the men's bar itself and really very wonderful stuff, served white hot, which is hard to achieve with beef, and with a generous side of Yorkshire pudding.
- Jules himself will once more be on duty as maître d'hôtel this summer at the Atlantic Beach Club on Long Island.