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To those of you
who do not read, watch old movies, or know anything of the world in which you
live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce this chapter by explicitly stating
that I wrote Bette Davis’s biography, Dark
Victory. My name is Ed Sikov. My native habitat is my living room, which
used to have a VCR, then a laserdisc machine, and now a Blu-Ray player. I am
essential to the world of film biography.
No, I’m not being
completely insulting and obnoxious; I’m paraphrasing one of the cinema’s most
articulate egomaniacs—Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), the theater
critic in Bette’s marvelous, incomparable All
About Eve. I’m reminded of Addison’s snarky self-introduction because I’ve
been thinking about Bette all day, particularly the earlier Davis classic—Jezebel, for which she won her second
Oscar. Jezebel is set in a
particularly hothouse New Orleans, the city that bestowed upon the world the
cocktail known as the Sazerac. My partner, Dan, loves Sazeracs. They’re the
only cocktail he ever voluntarily orders when we’re out. I sometimes order two of
something by, ahem, “mistake,” before he arrives, so he obtains a little
alcoholic nourishment from something other than his beloved chilled Pernod. In Jezebel, Bette ruins her life by wearing
the wrong dress to a New Orleans cotillion. Her intended, played by Henry
Fonda, has this enormous stick up his ass and drops her because of the dress,
but then comes down with yellow fever near the end, and Bette climbs aboard the
cart that’s dragging him to the island of the lepers, and they both are
presumed to lose their noses to leprosy and die happily ever after. It’s
fabulous.
Recipes for
Sazeracs are just like certain scenes in Jezebel:
elaborate and courtly rituals that are utterly meaningless and destructive.
“Take two glasses; put a sugar cube in one and rub the rim of the other with a
lemon peel, but don’t dare put the peel in the drink or I’ll challenge you to a
duel. Pour Absinthe onto the sugar cube in the first glass, and then add
precisely 4 drops of bitters…” You get the picture. I refuse to participate in
rites that Southerners treat as “antebellum” but are actually antediluvian. If
I want a drink, I want to mix it and drink it now, not spend what seems like 6
hours in order to make the quaint-to-the-point-of-inanity traditional New
Orleans Sazerac recipes that are handed down from New Orleans father to New
Orleans son—much like the slaves these fine, hidebound white people used to own
before they lost the Civil War and had to give their human chattel their
freedom.
Moving right
along…Dan and I were at the beach house by ourselves, for once, and I couldn’t
deal with Dan’s sipping a simple chilled Pernod while I experimented with
liquors and potions for my cocktails column, so I surprised him by arriving
first and buying a bottle of good rye and a bottle of the wicked, brain-melting
Absinthe. “I’ll make mine with Pernod,” was his response to my offer of a
wormwood-aged, formerly-illegal Absinthe-kissed Sazerac.” “Cripe!” I blurted.
“Make what you want.”
I took the Absinthe
out to the deck and forgot entirely about mixing it with rye.
The next evening I
was still on the ant antebellum crusade.
“This
is just like Jezebel,” I snarled as I
leafed through the cocktail books. Some were mine, but most came with the
house, which was built by the guy who owned “Showers”—it’s a bar in
Chelsea that features guys in Speedos drenching , self-lovingly soaping, and
rinsing themselves onstage. The old gang showers at the Columbia gym were
hotter.
The
Sazerac was born in the Big Easy. Easy? That’s
a laugh! “The South should have seceded,” I muttered. “These recipes are
inane.”
“Then
don’t make them,” Dan sighed. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I had one at that
conference in Satan’s humid maw” (New Orleans), “and I thought you’d like it. I
should have my head examined.”
“For
what? Lice?”
Poor
Dan. “Listen to this,” I said. “‘Pack a 3 ½ -ounce glass with ice.’ (‘Not a
4-ounce glass, not a 3-ounce glass, but a precious little 3 ½ -ounce glass.
Cripe!’) ‘In another 3 ½-ounce glass, moisten
a sugar cube with water, then crush it.’ (‘Oh sweet Mary!’) ‘Blend with rye and
bitters. Add cubes of ice and stir. Dump out the ice and pour in the absinthe.
Coat the inside of the glass and pour out the excess.’ (‘No, asshole—drink
it!’) ‘Strain the rye into the absinthe-coated glass. Twist a lemon peel over
the glass so that the lemon oil cascades into the drink.’ (‘Cascades! That’s
Bette’s psycho asylum in Now, Voyager!’)
‘Then rub the peel over the rim of the glass.”
Then came the most
idiotic sentence ever written in a cocktail recipe: “As Wilfred Frisbee St.
Bernard says, ‘Do not commit the sacrilege of dropping the peel into the drink.’”
“Ohhhh,” I
intoned. “It’s a sacrilege. Remind me to plop a whole lemon in.”’
Dan
was getting sick of it. “I wish I—no, you
had never been born. Why don’t you drink your vodka on the rocks and I’ll have
Pernod and we’ll give the absinthe away to a needy child.”
“No!”
I shouted a bit too loud. (I’d been sneaking hits of absinthe all afternoon.)
“I’ll make the damn Sazeracs. Only I’m going to do it my way. Let New fucking Orleans
declare war on me.”
By
the third round of Sazeracs, which are quite powerful, we’d done 180s: I was
extolling the virtues of antebellum gentility, while Dan was strategizing the
next Civil War.
