IN THE LIGHT of an investment of time, extending now over several decades, of money, effort, and travel, with our own particular genius for chaos involved, this department has no least hesitancy in claiming for itself a certain expertise in the field of public routs, celebrations, tumults, and disorders. For years we took our preparatory training in uproar in the old Fakirs Balls of infamous memory, later the communist debutante parties staged by Cynthia White in Webster Hall in the Village, and still later in the Beaux Arts Balls, which lasted precisely as long as Gretchen Menken did, and which disappeared with the going of that kind and imaginative lady.
During this period, we conducted side researches into such notable and bedlamite doings as the openings of two World's Fairs, one in New York and one in Chicago, participated bodily and to no good end in the four days of “Fiesta” which ushered in the San Francisco World's Fair, attended the old Hale House balls after the Harvard-Yale football games at the Copley Plaza in Boston, went to Derby Day as an undergraduate at New Haven, and never failed to turn up for that superessay into alcoholic dementia and yachting madness, the Harvard-Yale boat races at New London.
We have never been to a Beaux Arts Ball in Paris nor participated in a moon dance among the Ojibways, but we missed none of the great safaris to film premières which were staged during the thirties at such improbable points as Dodge City, Omaha, Santa Fe, and Virginia City, a series of promotional morris-dance festivals which won us a graduate degree in frontier follies, and only lately we became acquainted with the details of something annually known as Nevada Day at Carson City, an overproof, broad-gauge bit of nonsense at which there are almost as many horses in the saloons of Carson Valley as there are pedestrian customers.
For free-wheeling catastrophe and cataclysmic hurrah, however, few of these, even in recollection—and some of them have been notable—live up for sustained brilliance to Mardi Gras, a sort of Carribean earthquake which, scientists forecast, will be repeated this year on the first day of March and which is well worth your going to New Orleans for if you have nothing better to do than ruin your health, destroy your reputation, and have a perfectly fascinating time.
Advice about how to conduct oneself and what to see and do at Mardi Gras is largely an impertinence and comes in wholesale lots on every hand. Everyone wants to eat at Antoine's and everyone with any discrimination wants to eat at Arnaud's, a far less wholesale establishment and one where the waiters definitely do not attempt to persuade the customers to eat oysters Rockefeller. The chances are that most folks who go to Mardi Gras never get near either Antoine's or Arnaud's but eat on a catch-as-catch-can basis between skirmishes with the more obvious fleshpots, and in this case the little oyster bars which specialize in such unpretentious fare as Poor Boy sandwiches, broiled Canadian bacon, fried shrimp, and such substantial matters are to be recommended as are the poor man's restaurants in no other city in the United States. There is one, the name of which escapes our mind, just off Canal Street in St. Charles Avenue on the St. Charles Hotel side, one of whose Poor Boy—or Po' Boy—sandwiches we would not exchange for a steak Diane at Jack and Charlie's, and that is saying more than considerable.
The one New Orleans deadfall which should on no account be missed, and whose proprietors would be alarmed if it were described as anything but a deadfall, is the Lafitte Tavern, which is located about a mile deep in the Vieux Carré on Bourbon Street. Bourbon has, of course, been nominated as the wickedest street in the world, but its wickedness is of a Shubert-road-show order until about the point the Lafitte is achieved, when it becomes at once atmospheric, authentic, and of a sort you don't write home about to your Aunt Sophie.
Proprietors of this gaudy el dumpo, which looks like a haunted farmhouse on the outside and inside resembles nothing so much as Halloween in hell, are Tom Taplinger and Mary Collins, and they are a pair of drolls to give you pause. Taplinger, an émigré from, of all quiescent places, Maysville, Kentucky, is the acknowledged Mayor of the French Quarter, and Miss Collins is a frail little lady with a bob of graying hair and a Whistler's-mother manner who can fetch a recalcitrant customer a crack with a bung starter that will paralyze him for a week while she compares samples of crochet work with a neighboring beldam from the Quarter.
In a city which prides itself in taking the suckers, but good, during Mardi Gras, drinks at Lafitte are invariably what they say they are and of full, honest measure, a circumstance which has fouled up the navigation of many an explorer whose only previous experience with New Orleans slings and toddies had been in the quarter-ounce mills down the street. The tumult and the screaming are continuous, and if the customers fall into the forge, where once the pirate Lafitte used to fashion his cutlery before scuttling merchantmen, the management doesn't mind in the least. The customers burn with a clear, blue flame, thereby substantiating the management's fame for the purity of its spirits.
There is a good deal that is admittedly bogus and tourist-inspired about New Orleans at Mardi Gras, but if the dementia at Lafitte is synthetic, then so is the hangover this department carried away as a souvenir the last time it was down. This Taj Mahal of indispositions, this tall tower of shakes and mutters, didn't visibly abate until it reached its native New York and that, it may be remarked parenthetically, is a long time on the railroads of the Deep South.
A suspicion which has for some time been crescent in the mind of this department whenever it has occasion to peruse one of the several stylish, coated-paper periodicals devoted to women's fashions as well as the daily papers with women's departments, has been that a preposterous discrepancy seems to exist in their editors' minds between their readers' taste in food and wine and their taste in apparel. This suspicion has been altogether confirmed by Mrs. Jeanne Owen, secretary of the Wine and Food Society and New York's most notable lady gourmet, who is frequently called on in her professional capacity as a table arbiter to help out fashion editors in matters beyond their own knowledge or experience.
It seems a fixed and immovable thesis in the minds of style reporters and fashion editors, as well as of the minor functionaries charged with photography and make-up details, that although a woman's taste and means may allow her to wear a ＄1,000 evening gown, a ＄20,000 sable wrap, and an incalculable quantity of diamonds, cabochon emeralds, and other trifles of ornamentation, she makes a practice of dining on warmed-over dishes, ragouts, and entrails and wouldn't consider paying more than ＄1.50 for the house dinner, although she is constantly depicted as dining at Jack and Charlie's, the Colony, or Henri Soulé's.
For the enlightenment of fashion writers, the information might be gently relayed that a light supper with wine can be had at any of these places for ＄75, but that if the paradigms of fashion about whom they write want the full dinner treatment, the check for two will come much closer to ＄100.
Mrs. Owen reports that it is a fetish with magazine editors that the dreamy creatures who are depicted in their pages wearing garments and jewelry whose total may be a cool ＄100,000 in retail cost, must always be photographed for their color spreads munching on cottagecheese salads, sipping wines at fifty-nine cents a quart, and eating tasty, warmedover dishes that Hilda can run up on the basis, presumably, of last night's warmed-over dishes. The notion that a woman who can afford ＄100 for her Delman evening slippers will not pony up with anything better than a salami sandwich with mediocre sherry for her guests would be so fantastic as to be merely humorous, were it not that this complete delusion gets passed on to readers who take it as gospel.
It is about as reasonable to believe that Mrs. Harrison Williams wears twenty-cent cotton stockings with her Worth evening dresses as it is that she and her guests, wearing the most beautiful clothes known to the Rue de la Paix or Fifty-seventh Street, sit down to dinners of Spam and sauerkraut.
A stunning example of this technique of cheapening the subjects of their supposedly flattering articles by coated paper magazines was the pictures and story in a recent issue of Vogue detailing one of Mme. Valentina's fabulous Russian Easter supper parties. The photographs showed the guests to be about as sumptuously attired as the ranking professional people of New York can afford to be, which is not hay: Valentina in a little number of antique lace insured for ＄25,000, the masculine guests in full formal evening attire, the buffet laid with priceless china and a profusion of crystal to shame a Lord Mayor's dinner. But the reporter inserted a sly note to the effect that supper itself featured hot dogs, a mendacity which any slight study of the pictures would prove abundantly, but which, nevertheless, is part of the cheapening technique of fashion magazines in the hope of establishing some sort of spurious bond between the Colonel's Lady and Judy O'Grady. They don't dare to do it in the realm of clothes, from which their entire advertising revenue derives, so they contrive a democratic slant by depicting the aristocracy as habitually entertaining formally on a menu of liver and onions.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that good taste in apparel is almost invariably complemented in women of fashion by sound and luxurious taste in food and wine. If this is not the case, why, then, the acknowledged dominance of such celebrated luxury resorts of gastronomy as the aforementioned Jack and Charlie's, Colony, Soulé's, et al, as the world's foremost parades of fashion as well? The menus of these establishments fail to reveal any sign of the fish-and-chips diet which fashion magazines advertise as the exclusive fare of the well to do.
In any sensible and ordered way of life, a woman will go to as much trouble, if not more, proportionally, over what she eats as over what she wears, and it might crudely be hinted that there are even women who don't give a hoot about whether their slip is showing who will spend a whole day in the kitchen seeing that cook gets the pheasant Souvaroff just right for her company.
Ever alert to acquire for the legend any anecdote concerning the Palace in San Francisco, a hotel which has long and not too secretly exerted a fascination for him, your reporter encountered a new and to him agreeable fragment about the old Palace in the days before the Fire. One of the most distinguished permanent residents of Senator Sharon's property in the eighties was Mrs. Lilly Hitchcock Coit who, at a later date, built the Coit Memorial Tower, now one of the less unobtrusive sights of San Francisco atop Telegraph Hill. In her youth Mrs. Coit was an individualist of exciting proportions, “fast” it was called then, and among other alarming things, a female fire buff of wide repute. One evening, when down on the Peninsula, she permitted two gentlemen of her acquaintance to occupy her apartment at the Palace for a quiet game of bridge whist, in the course of which words were passed and one of the gentlemen became shot—fatally. The next day Mrs. Coit, her wig reportedly askew for the first time in recorded history, appeared at her solicitor's office demanding damages against the Chronicle, a then somewhat racier sheet than it has since become. The old gentleman was amused by her tones of outrage and remarked that she never seemed to have resented publicity before now, even if it were of a somewhat audacious nature. “Certainly I don't mind being in the papers,” screamed the lady in you-can't-do-this-to-me tones, “but look what the wretches have said: `Shooting in the apartment of a Mrs. Coit!' Doesn't everyone know who I am?”
It is one of the humorous and ironic circumstances of the legitimate theater that Maxwell Anderson, who is forever having at drama reporters with halberds and dagonels, puts them now and then to rout, not with any frontal assault by arms, but by the simple and, apparently, unconsidered device of writing wonderful plays. Whenever he writes a perfect stinker and gets all fouled up with social consciousness and geopolitics and otherwise tries to unburden himself of personal life-force agonies, earning thereby the sneezes and yawns of all concerned, the man screams that he has been basely attacked and done in the eye with malice and capitalist treachery.
It is apparent at the Broadway moment that kind friends have taken him aside and persuaded him to wisdom, for in Anne of the Thousand Days he has done more to justify Anderson and confound his enemies than he ever accomplished by taking space in the public prints to complain that such rubbish as Truckline Café was thrown on the trash heap where it belonged because the drama critics had a personal mad on.
Anne of the Thousand Days is, mercifully, innocent of any bill of goods whatsoever and comes to the customers as a vastly exciting costume piece, beautifully written and, to the date this notice is being filed, far and away the outstanding business of the theater season. Somewhere along the line, Mr. Anderson, Hank Potter, who directed Anne, and Rex Harrison, who plays its leading role, have recaptured the elusive quality known as “theater” and have synthesized their various capacities to produce some unforgettable moments in an evening of almost pure pleasure for the customer.
The theme of this elaborately mounted and handsomely upholstered poetic melodrama is the interlude in the life of Henry VIII of Tudor England in which he married Anne Boleyn, his second wife, became the reluctant father of the future Queen Elizabeth, and discovered that kinging it is not all stag hunting and the lifting of handy petticoats. It has not been this department's fortune ever to see Henry impersonated on the speaking stage before Mr. Harrison, and there is, therefore, no available measuring stick for his performance, but it is difficult to imagine an actor who could invest the part with more kingly indecision, more royal authority, or more of the manly vigor for which Henry's name has been a synonym over the centuries. Not that the part isn't a setup, to a certain extent, by virtue of the Holbein portrait and the Tudor legend, but it seems to the reporter, as it did to every other Broadway reviewer, that Harrison let slip no opportunity of improving on both of these and evolving a characterization at once moving, terrifying, and provocative of what is technically known as “reader association.”
Until some even more effective theater notion comes to Mr. Anderson's attention, Anne is a far more valid claim to fame and attention than all the letters he can write to the Times about geopolitics, and it is widely hoped that its resounding success will be a lesson to him.