To take care of this particular customer, any number of vermouth producers have evolved a wine of vermouth flavor that is practically white instead of the normal yellow-brown of true French vermouth. An economical barkeep can simply take this pale vermouth and use it in reverse proportions of three parts vermouth to one of gin and, so far as the eye of the customer is concerned, there is no way of telling. Often enough the palate of the dry Martini drinker is so far gone that he has no idea what is in his drink anyway, and the profit to the house, in light of the fact that gin is very expensive and vermouth costs almost nothing, is considerable. Having cultivated an affectation for an improperly devised drink by the terms of whose composition the customer thought he was putting one over on the house and getting an extra quantity of spirits, he has now arranged it so that the house can take him for a sucker every time he commands a very dry Martini.
For the instruction and edification of our clients, “Along the Boulevards” supports at great cost an almost universal system of correspondents which, for veracity of their dispatches and brilliance of coverage, makes such services as those maintained by the Associated Press and the Kiplinger Letters seem trifling and ineffectual by comparison. This month's dispatch from Nunnally Johnson, describing in all its terror and pathos the great Hollywood depression of 1948, follows:
“You probably know that the moving picture business is a tiny island of despairing depression in an otherwise booming national prosperity. Everywhere else men are smoking two fifty-cent cigars at a time, throwing away their Lincoln Continentals when the ash trays get full, and treating the children to triple-scoop ice cream cones three times a day. In Hollywood our tips are down to a maximum of five dollars for the shine boy.
”Herman Mankiewicz, a local quidnunc, and I the other evening found L'Aiglon, our sassiest restaurant, completely empty. Not even an agent. Poor Mike Romanoff has contracted a morganatic alliance, possibly to guarantee himself against being alone in his restaurant at mealtimes. Mike has a pathetic remnant of trade and is wisely devoting more of his time to his column, which is guaranteed to alienate, deliberately, half the people he mentions in it. An example of his critical fearlessness, proclaimed to the world through his column, which he prints on a menu the size of a pillow case, is that James Mason has no more acting talent than Richard Ney. Mike often manages to dispose of two potential customers in one sentence.
“Chasen's is the only place in this part of town doing any business at all. Dave has always been very wise. Instead of devoting himself 100 per cent to the transient gentry of the film set, he has always invited one and all, the only condition being momentary solvency. Rich persons with no recent professional credits have been pushed around in L'Aiglon and Mike's like starlets trying to get into Jack and Charlie's at dinnertime, the result being that such wealthy nobodies are now eating elsewhere, and the only pushing around that is done nowadays is when the waiters move forward in a body to pick up an unidentified tip. Meanwhile, Dave is shaking hands with people who made their money in trade, and, after a delicate frisk to see that they brought their wallets along, they are being led to the finest tables in the joint. All this has a moral.”
A number of years ago, when this department was elsewhere employed in reporting the excitements and good things of life and before GOURMET had so much as run its first issue from the presses, we first encountered that now commonly available synthesis of nectar and T.N.T. known as Southern Comfort. It was in those times a beverage and form of catastrophe more or less local to Missouri and the Middle West, and the first place we sampled it was a country roadhouse on the outskirts of St. Louis where the management would serve customers only if they were safely enclosed, quite literally, in little pagodas or gazebos made of chicken wire in the summer garden out back. When the waiter served a round, he hastily slammed and bolted the entrance to these bombproofs and retired to a safe distance to see what effect the drinks had on the customers. Very often the management found it was even worth charging a little admission for, and the neighbors were admitted to watch the patrons drink Southern Comforts much as they might be asked to view Mardi Gras at the zoo.
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