The Boulevardier
Queasy in the speakeasy, going too far with the sidecar
What mattered more for Manet and Monet,
That Manet had money or Monet had manners?
Mattered to what, pray? Mattered to whom?
To Monet’s manner, or just Manet’s mother?
— T.J. Clark, 2005Le coeur mène où il va. Despite the half-hearted assurances in last week’s Hexagon, today’s piece will not be about the painters mentioned in the stanza above, about how the former “Manetized and then wanted to de-Monetize” the latter (“après l'avoir manetisé il voudrait bien le démonétiser”), nor about the models Manet-ipulated in Olympia, below.
All that now seems too far away to matter. Over the course of this week, that half of my heart and its counterpart have been forced to turn their attention elsewhere. As I’m sure have yours. Le coeur mène où il va. And the eyes follow. And it’s hard to look away. And how I interpret what I see doesn’t matter. Nor do my opinions. Because there’s nothing I can do about any of it. Which is depressing.
So let’s grab a drink.
Where?
When we first moved here, you could count the city’s worthy watering holes on one finger: Le Rosebud, a bar-américan in Montparnasse. I’m told it changed hands recently but that, except for the controversial addition on certain nights of a DJ (from Baltimore of all places), they haven’t screwed with the winning formula: professional waiters in white jackets and black ties, low light, low jazz, serviceable steaks and tartare, free crackers and olives, great classic cocktails by Titi, the head barman since 1985, and the same stately decor from 1962, the year it opened, by Paul Rebeyrolle, a painter and sculptor lionized by Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.
Le Rosebud, after Charles Foster Kane’s sled, not Le Flore, after the goddess of flowers and springtime, was the real hangout of Jean-Paul Sartre. And Simone de Beauvoir. And Diego Giacometti. And Samuel Beckett. And Roland Barthes. And Marguerite Duras. Etcetera.
But, alas, it’s too far away. I'm a fanatical devotee of the 15-minute city concept, a big plank in Mayor Hidalgo’s successful 2020 re-election platform and a favourite bugaboo of “Great Reset” conspiracy cranks like UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the comically crackpot Jordan Peterson.
Bike lanes, low-traffic neighbourhoods, incentives for new local bookstores, bakers, butchers, cobblers, cheese shops, greengrocers, key cutters, etcetera — what’s not to like? I’m all in. And the Rosebud, alas, is not in my quarter-hour grid. It’s an hour and 20 minutes from my place on foot. Twenty-seven minutes by bike. Thirty-two minutes by public transport. Forty-three by car (as if you’d ever catch me driving a car in Paris).
Back in the day, when we were footlooser and Paris was a more moveable feast — and there were next to no spots anywhere in town that properly shook or stirred — sure, Le Rosebud. Now, no.
And yes, there was and is Harry’s New York Bar (15 minutes by bike), but it was, and I’m sure still is, an overpriced mecca for unimaginative American tourists. As was and is the Bar Hemingway in the Paris Ritz hotel, except there the tourists were not only dull around the edges but obscenely rich, which, for reasons too numerous and penurious to get into here, has never really been my… thing.
In the early noughties, a well drink at the Hemingway cost, if I recall correctly, 28 euros. My memory is a bit hazy — because of the cocktails, yes, but also because C. and I wrote all the copy for the Ritz’s in-house magazine, so we never had to shell out a sou.
That’s the Hemingway’s Colin Field describing his 400€ Sidecar made with an 1858 cognac to John Rossant, at the time a senior editor at Business Week. And that’s me to Colin’s left, just outside the frame, sipping on a Sidecar.
No that’s not a typo. A €400 sidecar. In 2003. Not sure what they charge today - or if there’s any of that 1858 cognac left — but if the inflation calculator I just popped 400€ into is accurate, that’s €669.11 of today’s money.
For a beverage. In a small glass.
COLIN: “I’ve always wanted to get in the Guinness Book of World Records, and I’ve figured out a way how — the world’s most expensive cocktail.”
Back then, every two months, along with puff about Proust and pastries and expensive watches, the afternoon tea in the Vendôme, the caviar facials in the Ritz spa, and the “signature” dishes in the hotel’s “iconic” Table de L’Espadon restaurant, I wrote a short fly-on-the-wall piece about the Hemingway.
Colin and a customer would have a chat at the bar about one of his many cocktail creations, and I would sit next to them, taking notes while happily slurping down whatever the drink was.
We had at least a couple of Sidecars during this interview with Rossant. Not with the pre-phylloxera cognac, unfortunately, just the regular X.O. stuff from the well, but damn tasty all the same. In fact, so enamoured was I with the drink that immediately after the interview I bought cognac, Cointreau and lemons, raced home, and mixed up a batch or three for C. and me.
I haven’t been able to look at one since. Even putting the word “side” anywhere near the word “car” makes me queasy.
Colin, considered by many the world’s greatest bartender of his epoch, left the Hemingway on May 15th of this year, after 29 years of service. According to the linked NYT article, you can now sample his prowess two nights a week at Maison Proust, a new 5-star hotel in the 3rd. I haven’t been. It looks nice in the photos. It’s only 9 minutes by bike. But the cocktail prices aren’t listed. So.
I haven’t been to the Hemingway in yonks, either. Not because it’s two minutes by bike beyond the cut-off mark (and eight minutes too far by metro), but because C. and I no longer write for the Ritz. (We don’t write the Plaza Athénée’s magazine anymore either, which is why you won’t see me sitting down to Alain Ducasse’s sous-vide chicken there anytime soon.)
I pretty much stick to wine, anyway. If I hanker for a mixed drink, Le Renard Bar, five seconds from my door on foot, does a perfectly excellent pisco sour during happy hour for only eight euros.
Max, at the Cave à Michel, probably my favourite wine bar in the city - and not only because it is only 15 seconds from my place — will pour me a hefty shot of smoky mezcal for €9 any time after 7 pm.
A short stumble uphill to Belleville and Jourdain will put me on a stool in an absurd number of groovy hipster cocktail bars. True, the servers and tenders spout mixology blather, and the phonebook-sized menus are filled with all manner of innovative nonsense, but, generally, what goes in the glasses is pretty good.
And what went in my glass last night in the Cambridge Public House on rue Poitou in the Marais — 11 minutes down the hill by bicycle — was a Boulevardier.
It pleased me. Even at 15€ a glass. And 5€ more for the almonds.
I chose the Boulevardier because the friend I was with, Aaron Peck, a writer from Vancouver, chose it for himself. Aaron has lived in New York, Brussels and now Paris, and, like many travelled sophisticates, he has strong, well-grounded opinions about many subjects. Including cocktails. When in a bar, I don’t follow my heart, I follow his lead.
The Cambridge is a bit of a hoof from his Left Bank apartment, but Aaron’s no lazy-ass WEF International Socialism stooge 15-minuter like me, he’s of the flaneur school, and something of a regular at the Cambridge because, when he first happened upon it, and found the quiet, chummy clubby ambiance to his liking, he requested a Sazerac — the drink he chooses to test a mixologist’s depth of skill — and the barman instantly queried, “Would you like that with cognac or rye?”
Most modern barmen, apparently, don’t know their sazeracs from their ass-sacks. Cambridge’s man, Nicolas Goredesky, though conventionally modern in his sleeve tatts and over-elaborated bewhiskerment, obviously knew his classics.
We’ve been to the Cambridge a few times, usually around 5 pm, when it’s just opened and still chill. It’s a nice mix of British pub and très cosy French speakeasy. Paintings of hounds on the walls, comfy chairs and banquettes, not too-awful music (though once while there we had to endure an entire side of Yes’s Relayer, which I hadn’t heard in probably 40 years, and which I couldn’t help but give all my attention to, body, mind and soul, as my teenage self had tattooed every single fucking lick and phrase deep into my brain stem) and the city’s best sausage rolls.
In the evening, however, it gets busy — judging by my visit there a week ago to sample the cocktails of a Melbourne friend’s nephew, Matt Stirling, one of nine barmen from nine countries invited to the Cambridge’s “Global Series” — a day-long cocktail counterpart to the Rugby World Cup.
Matt’s, made with Monkey Shoulder and god-knows-what-else, were bonzer.
Back to the Boulevardier. As anyone in the booze biz will tell you ad nauseam, it was named after a magazine of that name published by Erskine Gwynne, the “cherub-faced and rumpus-raising nephew of Cornelius Vanderbilt” (Time, Jan 07, 1929). They’ll tell you a bunch of other stuff too — about Harry MacElhone of Harry’s New York Bar and its first appearance in his book and then in that book and then how it’s like a Negroni but with bourbon or rye instead of gin and how it differs from an Old Pal, which is made with dry Vermouth instead of sweet Vermouth, and was named after another Harry’s regular named Bill “Sparrow” Robertson, a sportswriter for the New York Herald.
I’m not going into any of that shit. I’m not even going to give you the recipe. Or tell you what it tastes like — though I will tell what Helen Rosner says it tastes like (the New Yorker, like the New York Times, seems to be obsessed with the Boulevardier; it is featured in both every three years or so) — “it’s heady and deep, a woodsy cloud with a bitter edge, the flavor transforming on the tongue into something spicy and bright.”
Heady, deep, woodsy, cloudy, bitter, spicy, bright. To which you should probably add sweet.
Got it? Good.
Instead, I’m going to talk about poor old Erskine Gwynne and his world — without once using the terms “Lost Generation” or “Les années folles” or the “Roaring 20s”. Because, really, could anything have been more roaringly crazy and lost than the 20-20s?
The Boulevardier was a “Paris smart-chart” patterned after the New Yorker. It lasted a few years and had a circulation of 7,000. Which is twice the circulation of Hexagon. And those 7,000 were also all paying customers, whereas most of mine are… not.
Of course, unlike Hexagon, Boulevardier had serious, big-name writers on its masthead. James Joyce. Thomas Wolfe. Noël Coward. Sinclair Lewis. Ernest Hemingway. John Dos Passos. And at the helm, Erskine, a colourful figure, as was once said of such fellows, “quick with both wit and fists and sporting an invincible smile.”
Erskine wrote a few plays as a student, and like many Americans in Paris of his and every other generation, he was “working on a novel.” According to Time, before starting the magazine, Erskine wrote “pap for gullibles” for the “lurid, gumchewerish Hearst Sunday Magazine” including a series called “The Memoirs of Mrs. Jean Nash, by The Best Dressed and Most Extravagant Woman in the World.”
Except for the photo below, I have been unable to track down the series on Mrs. Nash; but no worthier a subject of memoirs can I imagine. In the 1920s and 1930s she was as famous for her wardrobe (“a woman must have at least four fur coats and two hundred silk stockings”), beauty tips (“champagne is an excellent hair wash”) and skill at the casino tables as she was for her six husbands. Her first marriage was an elopement at 16 in Dobbs Ferry, New York. It was quickly annulled, but not before the birth of her first son, Andrew. Her second marriage was three years later in Milburn, New Jersey, in a motor car, under the light of a streetlamp, and toasted with chocolate ice cream sodas in Newark. The following year (1914) she locked her mother in a closet and refused to let her out until she signed over several pieces of property. A lengthy lawsuit followed, and a divorce, and a third marriage to John Nash, a captain in the British army, whose modest salary was soon consumed by his wife’s hair wash and stockings. Her fourth marriage, in 1925, the year Erskine started writing her memoirs, was to the Egyptian Prince Mohammed Sabit Bey, whom she met in a casino in Cannes, and for whom she became a Moslem. It lasted a month. Shortly after, Sabit was in a Paris jail charged with pawning stolen cash, jewels, and motor cars. Jean was implicated but not arrested, and Sabit was released after a month. A few weeks later she was married to Paul Dubonnet of the aperitif winemaking family. The marriage lasted nearly 21 years — during which Jean’s first son Andrew was tried for murder and acquitted — before ending in divorce in 1948. In 1950 she married Guy Douglas Bridge Puckle, a broker with the London and New York Stock Exchanges and the holder of three British patents: two for systems for attaching daggers, knife blades or short bayonets onto a pistol or revolver; and a third for a Jeff Wall-like light box — a system for illuminating pictures by incorporating concealed lighting into the frame.
Back to Erskine. He was born in Paris in 1898, the son of Erskine Gwynne Sr, who the New York Times described, in his 1896 Wedding Announcement, as the “famous polo player and cross-country rider, expert golf player, possessor of several of the finest horses in America, and general social favorite”. Eight years later, the Cincinnati Times-Star reported that after a “rather strenuous career, having separated from his wife and passing through bankruptcy proceedings” he died suddenly of kidney failure, at 35, on the day of his bankruptcy hearing, leaving behind a widow, three young children and a mountain of debt.
Erskine’s uncle, as mentioned, was William Kissam Vanderbilt II, of the railway fortune. A man of expensive hobbies — motor cars and yachts — he presumably had enough left over to keep his nephews and nieces afloat. How much he gave his Erskine is difficult to say, as, unlike the Vanderbilt generation before him, Erskine worked most of his life. From 1915 to 1917, he reamed high-explosive shells in a French munition factory. He then joined the American Expeditionary Forces under Pershing. After the war, he worked his way around the world on cargo boats, before returning to Paris, in 1922, and somehow landing a job as private secretary of one of the richest men in France, Henri Letellier.
The Letelier family had casinos and hotels in Normandy, but his personal fortune came from oil fields in Mexico, real estate investments throughout Europe and South America, and, principally, publishing: among his holdings was the world’s third largest newspaper, Le Journal.
He was said to have 1,260 suits of clothes in his closets and 11 motor cars, mostly Voisins, in his garages.
In 1926, Henri married Yola Henriquez at a hotel on the French Riviera, where the writer Colette was also staying. Colette was intrigued by the “May-December” couple, especially when she learned that the two elderly women who ran the hotel were former courtisanes and had raised Yola as their own, and trained her, from an early age, in the fine art of bagging a millionaire. From whence:
That same year, on June 14, 1926, Erskine married the socialite Jane Armstrong, who was working in Paris as a model at the fashion house Patou. They honeymooned in Deauville, where Letellier was mayor, staying at the Hotel et Casino de Deauville, which Letellier owned.
According to the NYT, on a later occasion at the same casino, “a riot broke out early in the morning when Charles A. Levine and his aeronautic protegee Miss Mabel Boll encountered Erskine. ‘You the guy that edits the Boulevardier and is responsible for the dirty cracks taken at me?’ snarled Levine.
‘Yes, I’m the guy,’ replied Gwynne calmly. ‘What about it?’
‘Just that,’ shouted Levine, landing his left on the editor's jaw. Society women, millionaires and sportsmen rushed up to separate the pair. When the air cleared, Miss Boll, sparkling with diamonds as usual, took Levine's arm and led him away.”
On another occasion, in another casino, he was physically removed from the premises for decking a waiter who had “said something indecent to a lady”. Then, realizing he had left his best hat inside, he went around the back, shinnied his way up to a high window, crawled through, strolled across the casino room floor, retrieved the hat, and tipped it at the man who had thrown him out.
Last story, before we pack him in: Erskine once saw off a group of friends about to embark on a trip to America. “One parting drink turned into another, and the gathering got so out of control that he later awoke, surprised to find himself still on the ship, which was now steaming west in the middle of the Atlantic.”
The lifestyle seemed to catch up with Erskine in 1929. In May, at 30, he almost died of a heart attack. And lost his job with Henri Letellier.
Henri had several affairs. As did Yola. She was Lord Louis Mountbatten’s mistress from 1932 until his death in 1979. Did she have one with Erskine — the “Vanderbilt Playboy”? Le Nouveau Monde seemed to think so.
The divorce was in 1932, the same year the Boulevardier folded. The following year, while traveling in the US as a representative of a French wine company, the car Erskine was driving in — a Voisin, the favourite of Henri Letellier (or by some reports, a Bentley) — crashed into a parked truck filled with grapefruits and oranges. The driver, his cousin, the third William Kissam Vanderbilt, was killed. Erskine was tried, fined $50, and received a 30-day suspended sentence. He returned to France and lived with his mother on the Riviera.
In 1936, he found a publisher for the novel he had been working on for most of the previous decade. Paris Pandemonium is about an American socialite in Paris “out to torpeodo the town” before returning to marry her fiancé in the States. She meets a playboy named “Joe” who introduces her to the regulars at the Ritz bar, and takes her to peep shows and cocktail parties and a cafe where the men dress as women. He tells her why the ducks are numbered at the Tour d'Argent and why German students have dueling scars.
“Elementary tourisme,” panned the New York Times reviewer. “Paris Pandemonium offers only rudimentary devilishness.”
The book disappeared. As, soon, did Erskine. In 1938, he suffered a stroke, probably as a result of the accident. It left him partially paralyzed. He is mentioned only four more times in the NYT: in 1940, in an article about a $24,000 jewellery heist in the London West End apartment of Josephine, his ex, who was still going by the name of “Mrs. Erskine Gwynne”, and is described in the article as “the wife of a writer for the Paris Herald-Tribune and a close friend of the Duchess of Windsor, who she helped select her trousseau.” In 1941, Josephine married Hugh Molyneux, 7th Earl of Sefton — a life-long friend of the Duke of Windsor (he had been a Lord-in-waiting when Edward reigned in 1936).
The next mention is in 1946, when Erskine’s sister, Alice “Kiki” Preston, 48, a morphine, heroin and cocaine addict known in Paris, New York and Kenyan circles as “the girl with the silver syringe”, “jumped or fell from a bedroom window of her three-room apartment on the fifth floor of the Starhope Hotel, 995 Fifth Avenue. Her body was found in its pajamas in an areaway.”
Kiki was the widow of a bankrupted investment banker, a lover of Rudolph Valentino, and the alleged mother of a child with Prince George, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George V. Her story is covered in James Fox’s book White Mischief.
The last mention of Erskine, two years later:
Well, hell. Here I was looking for distractions, and hoping to provide some, and suddenly we’re 18 minutes into a boozy ramble knee-deep in desperate lives, with a corpse in pajamas to boot. And in an areaway, whatever that is.
Sorry. To make up for this, here’s yet another Boulevardier recipe, plagiarized directly from somewhere on the Internet. I forget where. Probably the New Yorker or the NYT.
Boulevardier
Ingredients
2 oz. bourbon or rye
1 oz. Campari
1 oz. sweet vermouth, such as Carpano Antica
A strip of lemon or orange zest, for garnish
Instructions
Fill a mixing glass with ice. Pour ingredients over ice and stir together. Strain into a martini glass or coupe, or into a rocks glass with ice. Twist the citrus zest over the drink, then drop it in.
Bottoms up.
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Ta.
Lovely stuff, Chris and Laura, but Manet was no more creepy than any other male of his day. His 'Olympia' is all about woman taking charge of their lives. He painted Laure (the African servant) three times, once in a portrait. He respected her.
Sazeracs are what the gods would have drunk if only they'd made mixology the portfolio of one of their peers.