Martini Read online

  About the book

  How to live a martini and mix a life.

  Acclaimed author Frank Moorhouse considers the world’s most elegant and mysterious cocktail whilst also reflecting on his life.

  At once a celebration of the most elegant, arcane and mysterious cocktail of them all - the martini - and a lyrical memoir of friendship and love won and lost, Martini: A Memoir is Frank Moorhouse at his melancholy and hilarious best. As he muses on the aesthetics of martini lore - olive or twist, shaken or stirred, Dorothy Parker or James Bond? - and the nature of drinking, Moorhouse reflects on the role of the martini in his own life in prose as dry and intoxicating as the martini itself.

  A book to have a drink with, Martini comes at a time of historic crisis: the loss of vermouth from the dry martini, and the advent of Crazy Drinks, which threaten everything the martini represents. A potent mixture of connoisseurship, folklore, legend, humour and personal dilemma, Martini is a port in a storm, a shoulder to cry on, a companion for cocktail hour and a celebration of all that’s truly fine in life.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Martini City

  The Story

  The Pageant of Learning

  Email to Ophelia in New York

  The Venerated Craft

  A Captivating Observation

  The Question of Coldness

  This Thing Called Gin

  The Vodka Option

  The Lost Vermouth

  A Disturbing Observation

  The Breast: the Bra: the Glass

  The Olive and the Lemon Tree

  The Diamond: the Pearl: the Acorn

  ‘The Olive on the Toothpick Gives the Drink an Axis’

  They Had a Date with Fate in Casablanca

  Liberating The Ritz

  The First Martini Film

  The Role of the Martini in Movie-making

  A Martini Matinée

  ‘The Orchestra is Playing Yellow Cocktail Music …’

  Canapés

  Scuba and Martini’s Law

  Mademoiselle and the Doctor and the Martini

  The Cocktail Dress

  The Whole Question of the Drinks’ Cart

  A New Drinks’ Trolley

  The Souls of Animals

  The Thirteen Awarenesses

  A Typical Martini Exchange

  The Mysteries

  Where are They Now?

  Memoir of a Story: Story of a Memoir

  A Letter to My Drinking Companions Around the World

  An Afterword Concerning Voltz, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Automatic Slims, and a Remarkable Letter

  The Classic Martini

  Acceptable Variations and Close Relatives of the Martini

  Crazy Drinks

  Martini Music

  What is This Demon? Alcohol and the Art of Drinking

  Notes

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright Page

  I dedicate this book to my dear friend and agent for

  many years, Rosemary Creswell, who guided and aided

  me in many aspects of my life and writing.

  ‘… it was an employment for his idle time, which

  was then not idly spent.’

  Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653)

  Martini City

  My friend V.I. Voltz, the Manhattan identity, and I had our first martini made from Plymouth gin in Cambridge, England, in Browns, under the revolving fans, amid the ferns and cane chairs. I was writer-in-residence at King’s College and he was working on ‘a project’, although I am led to believe he is a man of independent means. The Plymouth gin martini to which I had just introduced him is made from that gin that has a four-master sailing ship on its label. The label says, ‘Navy strength’.

  Martinis are made from either London gin or Plymouth gin (which confusingly is technically a ‘London gin’) and no others (there is something called Old Tom gin – a sweet gin which has just about disappeared from bars, so we won’t worry about that, sorry Old Tom) and never from Dutch gin or sloe gin (made from the small bluish-black sloe fruit with a sharp, sour taste, sometimes called Blackthorn Plum) which are both drinks that go their own ways.

  Martini in one hand, the other hand in his overcoat pocket, Voltz watched the bartenders. ‘They don’t care. Deliberation is one of the ingredients of the martini,’ he said. ‘It has to be made with deliberation. To care about the martini shows that you know what it is that goes to make that which could be called, in life, fine.’

  After a moment of thoughtful silence, Voltz said, ‘All that’s truly fine.’ And then, ‘All that’s truly fine in life.’

  I could tell that Voltz, standing there in his long, black Clintonesque overcoat, was not at ease in Browns. Truth be told, he is never at ease far from West Greenwich Village, although he claims to have a special affection for St Petersburg. To ward off criticism of my choice of cocktail bar, I said, ‘I’m afraid this is the only bar in Cambridge that serves a martini with any confidence.’

  ‘Confidence, as we know, in anything, is never enough,’ Voltz said. ‘The bartender should be able to talk a little about the drink he has crafted, discuss your preferences. Should acknowledge that you are a martini drinker, not just any off-the-street drinker. In life, there are drinkers and there are martini drinkers.’

  ‘In art, sincerity is never enough,’ I said.

  ‘Nor enthusiasm,’ Voltz added. ‘And nor are sincerity and enthusiasm in combination.’

  ‘Nor diligence.’

  ‘Not sincerity, enthusiasm, diligence or confidence in sum total.’

  There was too much light in Browns bar, albeit English light. ‘A martini bar has to be dim – never sunny,’ I said, feeling that I had to assert my own connoisseurship. ‘The company, too, is an ingredient of the martini.’

  ‘Alone is good,’ Voltz said.

  ‘Alone is fine. Without the stress of human company.’

  We sat down.

  ‘There are martini cities,’ Voltz offered when uncomfortably sat, legs stretched out, still in his over coat. ‘And there are cities in which you should never order a martini – I am increasingly unsure of Cambridge, England.’

  I had never thought about a ‘martini city’. It was another Voltz insight. ‘You are right, Voltz, there are martini cities.’

  ‘Las Vegas was once a martini city,’ he said. ‘It might have been a martini city in the 1950s, but it isn’t any longer. Lake Tahoe, perhaps, on a fall day.’

  I had never been to Lake Tahoe on a fall day but the way Voltz said it made me want to be at Lake Tahoe on a fall day, drinking a martini with him.

  ‘A martini city has a lustre of which only martini drinkers are aware,’ Voltz said, returning to the idea, swirling his martini, eating the olive and putting the pip in his overcoat pocket. ‘Such a city must be in Europe or the New World. Most of all it has to have the merit of being connected to books or movies or to the history of the martini. I would include some parts of Central Europe.’

  ‘I think Dunedin, New Zealand, is a martini city,’ I said, playing a wild card. ‘It is the furthest southern point of civilisation, a sombre, seaside university city of some culture. A poet, James K. Baxter, who was once banned came from there. James K. Baxter was New Zealand’s Ginsberg. Or vice versa. When I was there having a nervous breakdown three years ago, I had a martini made by a thoughtful bartender who knew of James K. Baxter and took good care of me.’ As I spoke, I felt a slight panic that I would not be able to successfully defend my nomination of Dunedin as a martini city.

  ‘I wouldn’t kn
ow about Dunedin, New Zealand,’ Voltz said, pulling a face as he drank, presumably again tasting the Plymouth gin martini which I now feared was also a mistake. ‘I know nothing about Dunedin, New Zealand. Or James K. Baxter. No disrespect. In my eyes, that you once had a nervous breakdown there is sufficient merit and I so proclaim it.’

  ‘Thank you for that compliment. I am not arguing for Dunedin with strong conviction. I wanted to demonstrate that you cannot always be certain whether a city is going to qualify as a martini city or not at first glance. The only line of Baxter’s I remember is “A man’s body is a meeting house”.’

  ‘Be that as it may about a man’s body,’ Voltz said, ‘New Delhi, for example, is definitely not a martini city.’

  Oh, I had heard differently but I could see that Dunedin might be more of a candidate than New Delhi – on first glance. ‘New Delhi, no, not on first glance, although I have heard people talk highly of martinis from New Delhi.’

  ‘I seriously doubt that New Delhi could be a martini city,’ Voltz said. ‘Regardless of what these people you know say. It is culturally too far from the source. A drink to have in the city of New Delhi might be the G and T or maybe a Chota Peg.’

  ‘Curiously, Tehran would be a contender,’ I said, flirting for his favour by offering yet another seemingly implausible city.

  Voltz looked at me, knowing that I knew something about Tehran that he did not. His ploy was to show no curiosity, banking, I suppose, on my not being able to keep silent about my little Tehran secret for too long.

  Perhaps with India in mind, for our second martini we went back to Bombay Sapphire gin with its ten botanicals (a ‘London’ gin regardless of the name, having no connection with Bombay). Voltz said he found the Plymouth gin ‘prickly’ and likened it to having a nettle placed on one’s tongue. I said that I myself did not mind an assertive gin because I chose to believe that they were the gins drunk in Gin Alley and in Hogarth’s drawings.

  ‘Cities aside, do you know the perfect bar for drinking a martini?’ Voltz asked. Drinking with Voltz could become something of a life test.

  My mind wandered around the bars of the world and came to settle on the Bayswater Brasserie in Sydney, but before I could come up with a more exotic answer, Voltz said, ‘A bar car on a train. The bar car on a train in Central Europe or North America, travelling first class.’

  Perfect. Sometimes Voltz, with his identification of the exquisite in human experience, is at times a magician. Of course a bar car on a train was the perfect martini bar, overlaid as it was with echoes of many great movies and novels, and with its suggestion of detachment from worldly concern, and with the undefined promise contained within all great journeys.

  ‘Probably on a train before World War II,’ I added.

  Voltz looked at me and considered this and then nodded at my refinement and he sipped his martini with a face that showed the lament that comes from sensing that we are in the wrong place, and perhaps living at the wrong time in history, and as a consequence, but also as a compensation, we are therefore remote from the self-important busyness around us and from all the clamouring news of the world and all its endeavours, events and claims.

  I added another refinement. ‘Watching the landscape receding rather than approaching.’

  He thought about this and nodded, saying, ‘You’re right about that too: receding not approaching.’

  ‘There is a nice paradox in the bar of a train being the perfect martini bar: it is in no city; it is disengaged from dwellings and from landscape. It is an imperturbable space.’

  Voltz nodded again. ‘That’s right, an imperturbable space.’ I could tell he was savouring the phrase. ‘Another of the great paradoxes of the martini.’

  ‘As a matter of interest, Voltz, have you ever drunk a martini on a plane?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Nor I. Not even in first class. It is unimaginable.’

  ‘They have nowhere to properly chill everything down. And furthermore, the martini glass should always be served filled to the brim. That’s not possible on a plane.’

  I asked Voltz what the filling of the glass to the brim was all about.

  ‘It’s a salute,’ he said.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘A salute to your guest. It says “no half measures”, or at least, “today there will be no half measures”. It represents the spirit of generosity and full-heartedness. Amplitude.’

  ‘Is that where the term “no half measure” comes from?’

  ‘I suspect so,’ said Voltz. ‘I suspect much of our wisdom comes from the martini. Directly or indirectly, that is.’

  ‘That may be going too far.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I told Voltz that I had been doing some work on the two-martinis-only rule, something we had considered many times over the years. I said that I’d discovered that the hazards of the third drink goes back a long way. That the 17th Century English poet George Herbert had written, ‘Drink not the third glass, which thou canst not tame when once it is within thee.’

  ‘It’s good that they knew about the third drink in the 17th Century. They probably disregarded it as frequently as we do. That’s why they had to bring in the rule.’

  ‘Sometimes it is said that the first drink is for amiability, the second for a silver tongue, and the third for a heart of gold.’

  ‘I enjoy scholarship,’ Voltz said.

  I said to Voltz that my publisher, Jane Palfreyman, once said to me that sometimes the edge of the night had to be jumped over. She said that three martinis was the cape to lay over the puddle of the night. Four was the pole to vault over the night altogether and land on another planet.

  Voltz lit up. ‘I think I like this Jane Palfreyman, your publisher.’

  I continued, ‘As you know only too well, I myself argue for the third drink and for all the good and unexpected things it may bring. Including the fourth drink. Another old saying is that the third drink is for temptation, the fourth is for folly.’

  ‘As well as scholarship you seem to be full of old sayings.’

  ‘It comes from being at King’s College,’ I said.

  ‘Temptation,’ Voltz said, ‘I consider to be an enlivened state of being and that happy folly always sorts itself out. That’s what I’ve discovered in life. You must put all this in your lecture on the martini you have in Shanghai and other dark cities.’

  ‘I will. You think I should become known as “someone who lectures on the martini”?’

  ‘Worse things could happen to a person.’

  ‘Suppose so.’

  ‘Between the wars they drank martinis in the Black Cat in Shanghai – Baker in Paris said the martini was invented at the Black Cat in 1928 by Baron Clappique and André Malraux.’

  Voltz and I looked at each other with the expression that said, ‘Yeah, right’.

  Voltz then reminded me that the famous Dorothy Parker martini poem combines folly and temptation in one stanza. We quoted it together.

  ‘l like to have a martini

  Two at the very most

  After three I’m under the table

  After four I’m under my host.’

  ‘Did you know that Dorothy Parker died alone complaining that she was broke but there were hundreds of uncashed cheques found in the drawers of her apartment?’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said.

  We drank our toast to Dorothy and ordered our third martini without discussion or hesitation.

  The Story

  I first wrote about the martini cocktail when I was in my thirties, well before I met Voltz. it was a story entitled ‘Martini’, which is in the book Forty-Seventeen.

  The story tells of an older man with his much younger lover at a beach house early in their affair.

  The man is teaching the girl how to make a martini.

  Martini

  He mixed the martini in the jug, stirring with studied performance. ‘Always stirred never shaken,’ he told her.


  ‘I’ve never drunk a martini in my life.’ She made it sound as if she were now fifty and had astoundingly missed the martini. Instead, she was seventeen and with no reason to have tasted a martini. ‘We can pretend we are in New York.’

  ‘Paris. It was actually invented by a Frenchman. And it’s named after an Italian.’

  ‘All right. If you like you can be in Paris and I’ll be in New York. I really want to be in New York.’

  ‘That’d be no fun.’

  ‘We could call each other from those nightclub table telephones.’

  ‘I like to know the vermouth is there in the martini,’ he said, in a donnish way, sniffing the jug for the vermouth. ‘Many don’t. The great martini drinkers just want the gin mixed with mystique. Let a beam of light pass through the vermouth bottle and strike the gin – that was sufficient, saith Luis Bunuel.’

  ‘Who is Luis Bunuel again? I know you told me once.’

  ‘Bunuel is a Spanish film director. When we are in Spain we’ll go –’

  She broke in, ‘Belle de Jour? Right?’

  ‘Correct. I took you to see it in some town in Victoria.’

  ‘What I remember is you in the motel afterwards.’ She giggled.

  ‘When we go to Spain we’ll go to Bunuel’s birthplace.’

  ‘You made me take money from you.’

  ‘Aragon.’

  ‘You showed me how a whore does it. And why do we have to go to people’s birthplaces?’