Memories, as Grizabella might have purred huskily in Cats, are not so much forgotten as mislaid.
Bruce Anderson is an old-school political journalist and cannot put his pen down. The Spectator specialises in quirky columnists like Robin Oakley (The Turf), briefly bullfighting by I think Lady Hesketh, and Bruce has a column, Drink. He writes in a discursive style that appeals to me. This week: The Art of the Cocktail. Dorothy Parker’s wise opinion is well-known: “I like to have a Martini, two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, after four I’m under my host”. Bruce goes on to trigger an almost forgotten memory.
”The late Roland Shaw, a great oilman in the full-blooded American way, had a more masculine injunction based on girls’ breasts, two being just right. As his martinis came in half-pint glasses and the lunches which followed extirpated any surviving scintilla of thirst, Miss Parker might not have been that safe.”
At the dawn of oil futures in Europe (1981) commodity brokers knew their onions – actually sugar, coffee, cocoa – but we were wary of oil. It isn’t a crop harvested seasonally and we had no connections in the industry. So we hopped in different directions. Where I was a junior employee we chummed up with a merchant bank. Ahh those were the days, my Chairman was an Oxford friend of a director of the bank. A competitor teamed up with Premier Oil, prop Roland Shaw. I never met him until years later …
A friend introduced us calling him, affectionately, Rolly-Poly Shaw. We met in a swanky Chinese restaurant. R-P S arrived through the kitchens because it was quicker than going round to the front – he wasn’t slim and swift like a greyhound. As it happens we did kick off with a Martini. He was a great raconteur of those early buccaneering days in the North Sea and I was only momentarily distracted when Michael Portillo walked in prowling like a small, powerful panther. It wasn’t just me who noticed – everyone in the restaurant was drawn into his magnetic field.
In the same article Bruce mentions he “sampled Woodford Reserve, the show-case whiskey produced by the House of Brown-Forman”. Unlike Jameson, Brown-Forman (founded 1870) is still majority-owned by the family. It is one of the biggest booze companies in the world but never too big to add to its portfolio. A recent niche acquisition is Slane Irish Whiskey on the banks of the Boyne in Co Meath (just). I’d like to meet Mr Brown to talk about the salmon running past his distillery and the history of the Boyne valley. Maybe I will, it’s not unusual.
This year, the New York Times carried an obituary of the publisher Jason Epstein. It included his account of a luncheon with the man of letters Edmund Wilson, at which Wilson, as soon as seated, asked for a half-dozen martinis. Wilson then graciously asked whether Epstein would have some martinis also. As one could judge from his journals, Wilson had a high tolerance for alcohol. In any case the luncheon conversation led eventually to the establishment of the Library of America.
I gave away my copy of Wilson’s (or Leon Edel’s) The Thirties without checking to see whether Wilson had ever encountered Dorothy Parker.
I note Edmund Wilson lived until he was seventy-seven. Joseph Roth, another writer too fond of a drink, died at forty-four. There seems little correlation between consumption and longevity. Thank you for such an interesting martini story.