Times are reportedly very tough in England, once the luxury center of a world empire, but you'd never know it from lunching amidst the wonderments of the magnificent “Mauretania” at her pier in the North River. Even granting that the chef, a veteran of the old “Mauretania” and accustomed to pleasuring the trans-Atlantic great since 1905, had access to American gustatory resources not available in England, it can safely be said that his hand hasn't lost its cunning at evolving an authentic double consommé, which for some reason is one of the most difficult of all soups to come by, or roasting a baby pheasant with a dressing of solid Strasbourg foie gras. The “Mauretania” is by no means one of these colossal ocean- crossing cities of prewar times, but in splendor of appointments and general glitter of maintenance it transcends anything within memory of this department in a maritime manner.
For a select group of gastronomic investigators, Chef J. Wills and Chief Steward Walter Wilson thought it would be nice to set out some hot hors d'oeuvres, served from a rolling voiture in the cocktail lounge; a full course of fresh caviar, each egg as large and individual as a Cartier pearl; the aforementioned double consommé, jellied; filet of sole à la Mauretania; a separate course of cold asparagus with tongs in the English manner; beautiful baby pheasant en casserole Souvaroff; and for dessert one of those elaborate fruit, ice, and cake arrangements so dear to the hearts of pastry chefs and known as a “buche,” all of the above accompanied by a polite deluge of Chambolle-Musigny 1920, Château Olivier 1928, and Veuve Cliquot 1934. It would have been hard to reduce under the circumstances and even harder to imagine one was lunching, both technically and by inference, in austerity-ridden England.
Like wistful souvenirs of spacious and splendid times departed, however, the asparagus tongs somehow caught a little at the heart, with a memory of long-ago lunches in Claridge's in West Brook Street when June was all over London and all the world was young.
It is improbable that since the time of its most celebrated practitioner, Pietro Aretino, in sixteenth-century Venice, the pasquinade, or expertly vicious and hilarious pamphlet circulated anonymously while its author is known to everyone, has ever had such a champion as Richard Knight. This Knight, unable to resist the impious joys of authorship, just as in the rememberable past he has been unable to resist practices which the law declared provocative or standing on his head in Sherry's Bar at the Metropolitan Opera, is now presumably a resident among the rich Freddy Beckman set in Cuernavaca, Old Mexico; and from this international vantage point he feels it safe to conceive and utter such dainty trifles as Life With Dorothy or Love Among the Rich, a copy of which has just come to these editorial mitts through channels that will not be disclosed here. It may even be an offense against the postal regulations to say that Mr. Knight uses the mails, and this department is taking no chances. It solemnly conjures you, however, if the opportunity offers and howsoever great the cost in gold or inconvenience, to come by a copy of this incomparable, if brief, autobiography.
In the past when Mr. Knight was plainly visible on a clear evening weaving rich sarabands among the palsied wealthy of New York's night clubs (“It is my proud boast that I have never been seen anything but drunk in those fetid cribs”), his attacks upon his father- in-law and other victim types were circulated in the form of modest feuilletons hastily apostrophized on a mimeographing machine. Life with Dorothy is elegantly printed in book form, with printer's ornaments in the form of pink elephants, and substantially bound in boards.
Mr. Knight is at odds with a variety of people ranging from Henry Luce to Mrs. Irving Berlin. It would be inexpedient here to illustrate the Knight treatment of people of whom he is not inordinately fond, but the following will give you an idea of his appraisal of a lady to whom he is, by his own admission, devoted.
“I have also remaining to me at least one friendship in Dallas which keeps me squatting squarely in the top-flight society of that Dimple of the Southwest. If you ever find yourself doing a split- week in the Dimple and you meet Mrs. Gracie Dexter Burgher, I urgently conjure you to please her. It will not only be pleasanter for you but, on the whole, safer. What I mean is that if anyone came running up to me and said a saber-toothed tiger was about to hop Mrs. Burgher, I would just yawn and say, `Who cares what happens to a saber-toothed tiger?'”
This will give you an idea. People whom Mr. Knight has not liked have frequently taken up residence in Antofagasta or even changed their names.
As we remarked before, it will prove rewarding if you can, handily or otherwise, come by a copy of Mr. Knight's current version of his life with Dorothy and among the rich, but don't ask how to achieve it.
It is difficult from the distance of Manhattan, where this is being written, to fathom the type of mentality which would, in the emetic name of expediency, deprive San Francisco of its cable cars and substitute for them the filthy auto-omnibus which is a commonplace in every other city in the land. Presumably it is the communal urge to show the world that San Francisco is a big boy now and can suffer all the inconveniences and monstrosities of complete modernization along with everyone else, but if Mayor Lapham or anyone with San Francisco's well-being truly at heart imagines that the rest of the world will not bitterly resent such a shabby abandonment of tradition, he is grievously in error.
The rest of the United States has always, and with ample justification, believed that San Francisco is something apart and a cut above the standardized utilitarianism of its surrounding civilization, a sparkling repository of some of yesterday's glamour, a city of unfettered personalities and a hundred banners flying from building tops in the brave winds of the Golden Gate. The legendary past is very close in San Francisco, as if in the clear atmosphere of the Pacific it were possible to see farther and with more nearly perfect discernment than elsewhere. Let San Francisco prove its modernity in other directions: its bridges, its opera, even its abandonment of the immemorial four-way trolley traffic of Market Street. Its strikes, its riots, its civic convulsions, its parades, and the hang-overs of its Bohemian Club are just as big as their equivalents elsewhere, bigger if San Francisco pleases. It is a commonplace that a great deal of the old charm and individualism of San Francisco disappeared with the Fire of 1906. More of it was a casualty of the urgencies of the last war. What is left is something more precious than Mayor Lapham seems to realize, or anyone else who would abolish the city's transcendent hallmark in favor of a very small handful of municipal dollars saved. More of the town would disappear with the cable cars than San Francisco seems to understand, and without them, in the general and uninstructed public mind, there would be little enough left to distinguish it from Los Angeles, and not all of that, perhaps, favorable.
It appears that close at hand and even as this is being written there is coming a day of reckoning for which several million beat-up Americans have been waiting since Pearl Harbor Day. It is the wonderful time when once more the customer is right and the purchaser, a person of consequence. This is a time when elephant memories are to be cultivated and a long succession of in- famies, endured in the spurious name of patriotism and bogus necessity, are to be revenged. There are markdown sales advertised in the newspapers; merchants are cutting prices right and left while their customers are deserting them in millions; the demand for motorcars is beginning to be satisfied, so that it is no longer necessary to bribe and corrupt to get a new hack; restaurants and night clubs are putting their snooty manners on ice; and even hotels, although filled everywhere to capacity, are beginning once more to circularize old patrons by mail against the inevitable day, not now distant, when their premises shall be vacant floor on floor at a time, and the casual, unannounced patron can have the imperial suite at the minimum rate and welcome. Ready money is drying up; folk are shopping for what they want instead of buying what they can get.
The American public will have deserved the trimming and beating it got from supercilious hotel clerks, insolent dining-car servants, and filling-station attendants, the swindling it received at the hands of restaurateurs and tailors and garage proprietors unless, now that its innings are at hand, it turns the tables. The guy with a dollar to spend is right now King of the United States, and he'll be a damneder fool than anyone supposes unless he throws his weight around from now on to get what he wants.
Parenthetically, too, it should be added that now is when virtue should have its reward and when the public should remember in its judicious spending and its favors the honest restaurateurs who didn't hike filet mignon to ＄5 while the hiking was good, the conscientious hotelier who still had a room for old patrons despite the importunities of money-crazed spenders, and the corner cabby (if any such can indeed be found) who in 1945 foresaw the eventual return of the dime tip and said “thank you” for a fare. Not everyone was a small-time profiteer, but this department has in mind a make of car it will never buy again and a railroad on whose diners it will never eat again, and the cause lies no further away than in the arrogance of their managements when all that the innocent customer wanted was the service that had been advertised.