The season's award for the most brilliantly executed gustatory barn-raising goes high, wide, and handsomely to the Pierre Hotel's chef des cuisines, Manuel Orta, for the splendid caviar carnival he arranged for the most recent dinner of the Chevaliers du Taste-vin. The whole business was a monstrous success. The dinner was beautifully devised and expertly mounted, altogether a triumphant production number and easily the finest the Chevaliers have enjoyed since before the war. This department recalls one dinner held at the St. Regis in the regime of Gaston Lauryssen which could stack up against the Pierre's, but nothing since then.
For one thing, the executive committee of the Chevaliers, headed by Jules Bohy, Michel Dreyfus, Gordon Brown, and Jean Ravaud, held no fewer than three rehearsal dinners with various menus before the final and happy selection was achieved. For another, the society relaxed its regulation against donations by wine-dealer members with the result that, for the first time in the history of the New York chapter, there was champagne on the menu. Champagne indeed, five choices and in seemingly limitless quantity. While champagne may seem heresy in the light of the strict Burgundian faith of the order, it certainly does things at the end of a dinner which cannot precisely be achieved with any other wine.
The menu marched grandly and as a state dinner should for so notable a confraternity through hors d'oeuvres and a double consommé, essentially frivolous trifles, to a salmon Chambord with écrevisses and truffles, which was a masterpiece of the fish chef's department. The third plate was a larded filet of beef which was substantially furnished forth and beautifully underdone, and the fourth plate was pheasant volière, in full plumage, served with a delicate mousse of foie gras and an altogether commendable salad of ice-cold endive. The pheasant was followed by an assortment of imported cheeses, so hard to come by nowadays, a spectacular iced confection for dessert, and the conventional coffee strong enough for anvil-floating.
The wines ran through a gamut of sherries, a Chevalier Montrachet, Les Demoiselles 1937, a Beaune Grèves 1938, and, of course, the Clos de Vougeot 1937 which is also from the Chevaliers' private cuvée and specially bottled for them. The champagne, which began to appear about the time the pheasant made its state entry, included Bollinger Brut 1937, George Goulet 1937, Ernest Irroy Brut 1941, Mumm's Cordon Rouge 1937, and Tattinger 1937. To this department's taste, the Bollinger was the great wine of this category and admirably suited to the fancy ices which comprised dessert, but that didn't prevent our sampling each of the other four. For a number of years now we have been favoring the Mumm's 1933 vintage, a big, vital, and highly alcoholic wine, and the 1937 seemed to have sacrificed some of these qualities in favor of more delicacy and bouquet. Generally speaking, we place our sparkling trust in Bollinger, Perrier-Jouet, and Krug, especially when they come in double magnums.
The wine, which was served in a splendid silver chalice borrowed for the occasion from a Fifth Avenue silver-smith, was a Vosne Romanée Malconsorts 1936, and, while only the newly initiated members of the order had this wine, it was reported on most favorably by them. The matter of the chalice is one of the club's mysteries. The same one seldom appears twice, and it occurs to mind that, if we are only borrowing the prop, why not a gold one and be done with it?
When Frank Paget, managing director of the Pierre, produced Mr. Orta at the conclusion of the meal, the applause amounted to an ovation. Mr. Orta is a Spaniard, and to make such an impression on a posse of confirmed Francophiles was something of an achievement. The late Charles Scotto, onetime chef of the Pierre and grand old man of American gastronomy, would have approved the whole symphonic performance from caviar to cognac. As has been remarked before, it is the best Chevalier dinner in recent history, and whatever establishment next undertakes their entertainment will be hard put to it to devise its match.
Even as far east as Manhattan, reports are coming through of the epic convulsion which is turning Colorado into two armed camps, the like of which hasn't been seen since the bad old days of the railroad wars between the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande back in the seventies and eighties. The issue at stake is whether or not the celebrated old Opera House at Central City, Colorado's most publicized and, at some seasons of the year, most populous "ghost town," shall be modernized and streamlined, as well as fireproofed.
Every year Central makes a fine thing out of its six-week opera season with large and expensive casts recruited from New York's Metropolitan. Only fifty miles from Denver and awash with the atmosphere of bonanza times and the legends of pioneer days and Haw Taber, Central City each summer relives its opulent youth with all Denver and Colorado Springs society on hand for first night and boiling shoals of solvent tourists for the rest of the season. Prime attractions are the Teller House, dating from the seventies and with every bonanza property of the age intact, the Glory Hole Saloon run by the Widow Wilson down the street, and, of course, the Opera House itself with its beautiful curtain, dress circle, curving staircase, and perfect acoustics.
Now the trustees of the Opera Association, which is closely connected with the University of Denver, are talking of modernizing the Opera House with fireproof "improvements" and, incidentally, a hundred extra seats which will eliminate the staircase, the balcony, and the dress circle. A substantial part of Denver is screaming vandalism and threatening to withdraw its financial support of Central if the façade of the venerable building is changed in any single detail.
The chances are that Frank Ricketson, Jr., president of the Association, wishes to high heaven he had never mentioned the word "modernize" because he has committed his organization to a program which may very well prove suicidal for Central and the end of its twentieth-century boom for all time. Opponents of the desecration of the premises maintain, and with some reason, that to modernize Central City will be to make it just one more summer theater festival and an inaccessible one at that, and that if the place hasn't burned down in three quarters of a century, the chances are against its happening now.
Led by Caroline Bancroft, a local historian of standing and determination. Colorado patriots are making life miserable for the Opera, and Aspen, a rival Rocky Mountain resort town with a Victorian building code which strictly interdicts any modernization of any structure whatsoever within its municipal limits, is setting its miner's cap for the tourist trade which will in all probability be diverted from Central if the word gets around that the place is no longer the atmospheric McCoy.
Colorado generally has done itself no good by letting the relics of its spacious youth disappear. The famed Tabor Opera Houses of both Leadville and Denver are gone, and every so often some civic nuisance law is invoked in an attempt to destroy Denver's magnificently Victorian Windsor Hotel, which any other community would endow as a local shrine. The commonwealth has allowed most of the little mountain railroads which provided so much atmosphere and charm to be abandoned for the preposterously infantile reason that they were losing a little money each year, the last example of this stupidity being the abandonment of the narrow gauge division of the tremendously wealthy Colorado and Southern that ran up Clear Creek to Georgetown and Black Hawk.
One of these days, when the last of its authentic attractions stemming from the legendary past has vanished, Colorado will discover that its last asset for the promotion of intelligent tourists has gone with it and that without them it will be on the level of competition with any number of other communities on a purely scenic basis. There are people by the thousands who would travel from far places to Colorado to ride a narrow gauge train or sleep in Haw Tabor's bed or drink in the bar of the Vendome at Leadville who wouldn't step across the street for all the ski slides on earth. Colorado, however, is hell-bent on eliminating everything even vaguely savoring of the old times, and it will at the same time contrive to eliminate its only attraction for numberless people.
There is little enough to report from the fringes of Broadway since this department's most recent monthly bulletin, save the almost total debacle achieved by the executive committee of the League of New York Theaters in its attempt (quite without the majority support of the members, incidentally) to forbid the playhouses on opening nights to members of the press other than the actual critics themselves. The aim was to bar all but one member of the staff of each paper, which meant paragraphers, Broadway columnists, drama editors, drama-news reporters, interviewers, and feature writers, and to give the seats they had occupied for years to interested persons, probably actors and other ringers, who could be counted on as a claque to applaud wildly even the cheesiest presentations.
When the consequences of such arbitrary folly became apparent to the majority of League members, who realized that they were delivering a gratuitous kick in the teeth to the best sources of glamour publicity possessed by the stage, the matter was hastily reconsidered, and the old first-night list restored almost in toto. Individual members of the League went on public record as wholly disowning the idea or any support of it so that, by process of elimination, it was possible for the actual sponsors of the plan to be known. It is reasonable to suppose that these will have occasion to regret their alienation of the reporters for some time to come.
Ironically enough, the turmoil over first-night seats ebbed and flowed during several weeks when there were no openings of sufficient consequence to bring out any but third-string reviewers and copy boys. The only presentation of even mild pretensions to meet this department's dead line was the amiable and sprightly but somewhat diffused "theater party" starring Grace and Paul Hartman called Angel in the Wings. A few years ago this would have been known as an "intimate revue" and that was what most people who saw it believe it to be. The Hartmans, who have made fun of pretentious dancing everywhere from the Plaza and the Waldorf right through the Blackstone to the more elegant ballrooms on San Francisco's Nob Hill, are wonderful when they are on stage, but the pace drags when they are not. No matter how enthusiastic you may be about the principals, it is difficult to see in Angel in the Wings any successors to the Little Shows, The Band Wagon, or even One for the Money.