The Martini is in, the Martini is back—or so young friends assure me. At Angelo and Maxie’s, on Park Avenue South, a thirtyish man with backswept Gordon Gekko hair lowers his cell as the bartender comes by and says, “Eddie, gimme a Bombay Sapphire, up.” At Patroon, a possibly married couple want two dirty Tanquerays—gin Martinis straight up, with the bits and leavings of a bottle of olives stirred in. At Nobu, a date begins with a saketini—a sake Martini with (avert your eyes) a sliver of cucumber on top. At Lotus, at the Merc Bar, and all over town, extremely thin young women hold their stemmed cocktail glasses at a little distance from their chests and avidly watch the shining oil twisted out of a strip of lemon peel spread across the pale surface of their gin or vodka Martini like a gas stain from an idling outboard. They are thinking Myrna Loy, they are thinking Nora Charles and Ava Gardner, and they are keeping their secret, which is that it was the chic shape of the glass—the slim narcissus stalk rising to a 1939 World’s Fair triangle above—that drew them to this drink. Before their first Martini ever, they saw themselves here with an icy Mart in one hand, sitting on a barstool, one leg crossed over the other, in a bar small enough so that a cigarette can be legally held in the other, and a curl of smoke rising above the murmurous conversation and the laughter. Heaven. The drink itself was a bit of a problem—that stark medicinal bite—but mercifully you can get a little help for that now with a splash of scarlet cranberry juice thrown in, or with a pink-grapefruit-cassis Martini, or a green-apple Martini, or a flat-out chocolate Martini, which makes you feel like a grownup twelve years old. All they are worried about—the tiniest dash of anxiety—is that this prettily tinted drink might allow someone to look at them and see Martha Stewart. Or that they’re drinking a variation on the Cosmopolitan, that Sarah Jessica Parker–“Sex and the City” craze that is so not in anymore.
Not to worry. In time, I think, these young topers will find their way back to the Martini, to the delectable real thing, and become more fashionable than they ever imagined. In the summer of 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Hyde Park—it was a few weeks before the Second World War began—and as twilight fell F.D.R. said, “My mother does not approve of cocktails and thinks you should have a cup of tea.” The King said, “Neither does my mother.” Then they had a couple of rounds of Martinis.
I myself might have had a Martini that same evening, at my mother and stepfather’s house in Maine, though at eighteen—almost nineteen—I was still young enough to prefer something sweeter, like the yummy, Cointreau-laced Sidecar. The Martini meant more, I knew that much, and soon thereafter, at college, I could order one or mix one with aplomb. As Ogden Nash put it, in “A Drink with Something in It”:
In John O’Hara’s 1934 novel, “Appointment in Samarra,” the doomed hero, Julian English, and his wife, Caroline, observe Christmas with his parents, as usual. They live in the Pennsylvania coal town of Gibbsville, but the Englishes are quality, and before their festive dinner Julian’s father, Dr. William English, mixes and serves up midday Martinis; then they have seconds.
In the 1940 classic movie comedy “The Philadelphia Story,” the reliable character actor John Halliday plays Katharine Hepburn’s reprobate father, who has returned home unexpectedly on the eve of her wedding. Standing on a terrace in the early evening, he mixes and pours a dry Martini for himself and his deceived but accepting wife (Mary Nash) while, at the same time, he quietly demolishes his daughter’s scorn for him and some of her abiding hauteur. It’s the central scene of the ravishing flick, since it begins Tracy Lord’s turnabout from chilly prig Main Line heiress to passably human Main Line heiress, and the Martini is the telling ritual: the presentation of sophistication’s Host. Hepburn had played the same part in the Broadway version of the Philip Barry play, a year before, which also required that Martini to be mixed and poured before our eyes. Sitting in the dark at both versions, I was entranced by the dialogue—only Philip Barry could have a seducer-dad convincingly instruct his daughter in morals—but at the same time made certain that the Martini was made right: a slosh of gin, a little vermouth, and a gentle stirring in the pitcher before the pouring and the first sips. Yes, O.K., my Martini-unconscious murmured, but next time maybe a little more ice, Seth.
This is not a joke. Barry’s stage business with the bottles and the silver stirring spoon in one moment does away with a tiresome block of explanation about the Lords: he’s run off with a night-club singer and she’s been betrayed, but they have shared an evening Martini together before this—for all their marriage, in fact—and soon they’ll be feeling much better. In the movie, which was directed by George Cukor, the afternoon loses its light as the drink is made and the talk sustained, and the whole tone of the drama shifts. Everyone is dressed for the coming party, and the Martini begins the renewing complications. Sitting in the theatre, we’re lit up a little, too, and ready for all that comes next—the dance, the scene by the pool—because the playwright has begun things right.
Cocktails at Hyde Park or on Philadelphia’s Main Line sound aristocratic, but the Second World War changed our ways. In the Pacific, where I was stationed, a couple of Navy fighter pilots told me a dumb story they’d heard in training, about the tiny survival kit that was handed out to flight-school graduates headed for carrier duty. “Open Only in Extreme Emergency,” it said—which seemed to be the case of a pilot north of Midway whose Grumman quit cold a hundred miles away from his flattop. After ditching, he climbed into his inflatable raft, regarded the empty horizon that encircled him, and opened the kit. Inside was a tiny shaker and a glass, a stirring straw, a thimbleful of gin, and an eyedropper’s worth of vermouth. He mixed and stirred, and was raising the mini-cocktail to his lips when he became aware that vessels had appeared from every quarter of the Pacific and were making toward him at top speed. The first to arrive, a torpedo boat, roared up, and its commanding officer, shouting through his megaphone, called, “That’s not the right way to make a dry Martini!”
Dryness was all, dryness was the main debate, and through the peacetime nineteen-forties and fifties we new suburbanites tilted the Noilly Prat bottle with increasing parsimony, as the Martini recipe went up from three parts gin and one part dry vermouth to four and five to one, halted briefly at six to one, and rose again from there. George Plimpton recently reminded me about the Montgomery—a fifteen-to-one Martini named after the British Field Marshal, who was said never to go into battle with less than these odds in his favor. What was happening, of course, was an improvement in the quality of everyday gin. The Frankenstein’s-laboratory taste of prohibition gin no longer needed a sweetener to hide its awfulness: just a few drops of Tribuno or Martini & Rossi Extra Dry would suffice to soften the ginny juniper bite.
Preciousness almost engulfed us, back then. Tiffany’s produced a tiny silver oil can, meant to dispense vermouth. Serious debates were mounted about the cool, urban superiority of the Gibson—a Martini with an onion in it—or the classicism of the traditional olive. Travellers came home from London or Paris with funny stories about the ghastly Martinis they’d been given in the Garrick Club or at the Hotel Regina bar. And, in a stuffy little volume called “The Hour,” the historian and Harper’s columnist Bernard De Voto wrote, “You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest.”
We appreciated our Martinis, and drank them before lunch and before dinner. I recall an inviting midtown restaurant called Cherio’s, where the lunchtime Martini came in chalice-sized glasses. Then we went back to work. “Those noontime cocktails just astound me,” a young woman colleague of mine said recently. “I don’t know how you did it.” Neither do I, anymore. My stepfather, E. B. White, sometimes took a dry Manhattan at lunch, but his evening Martini was a boon forever. Even when he’d gotten into his seventies and early eighties, I can remember his greeting me and my family at the Bangor airport late on a summer afternoon and handing me the keys to the car for the fifty-mile drive back to the coast. Sitting up front beside me, he’d reach for his little picnic basket, which contained a packet of Bremner wafers, some Brie or Gouda cheese and a knife, and the restorative thermos of Martinis.
At home, my vermouth mantra became “a little less than the absolute minimum,” but I began to see that coldness, not dryness, was the criterion. I tried the new upscale gins—Beefeater’s and the rest—but found them soft around the edges and went back to my everyday Gordon’s. In time, my wife and I shifted from gin to vodka, which was less argumentative. At dinners and parties, I knew all my guests’ preferences: the sister-in-law who wanted an “upside-down Martini”—a cautious four parts vermouth to one of gin—and a delightful neighbor who liked her Martinis so much that when I came around to get whiskey or brandy orders after dinner she dared not speak their name. “Well, maybe just a little gin on some ice for me,” she whispered. “With a dab of vermouth on top.”
We drank a lot, we loved to drink, and some of us did not survive it. Back in college, the mother of a girl I knew would sometimes fix herself a silver shaker of Martinis at lunchtime and head back upstairs to bed. “Good night,” she’d say. “Lovely to see you.”
I met entire families, two or three generations, who seemed bent on destroying themselves with booze. John Cheever, the Boccaccio of midcentury America, wrote all this in sad and thrilling detail. What seems strange now about celebrated stories of his like “The Country Husband,” “The Sorrows of Gin,” and “The Swimmer” is how rarely the Martini is mentioned, and how often it’s just called gin. Alcohol was central to this landscape, its great descending river.
It’s my theory—a guess, rather—that Martini drinking skipped a generation after Vietnam and marijuana came along. Many thousands of earlier suburban children, admitted to the dinner table or watching their parents’ parties from the next room, saw and heard the downside of the ritual—the raised voices and lowered control—and vowed to abandon the cocktail hour when they grew up. Some of them still blame Martinis for their parents’ divorces. Not until their children arrived and came of age did the slim glass and the delectable lift of the drink reassert itself, and carry us back to the beginning of this story.
I still have a drink each evening, but more often now it’s Scotch. When guests come to dinner, there are always one or two to whom I automatically offer Pellegrino or a Coke: their drinking days are behind them. Others ask for water or wait for a single glass of wine with the meal. But if there’s a friend tonight with the old predilection, I’ll mix up a Martini for the two of us, in the way we like it, filling a small glass pitcher with ice cubes that I’ve cracked into quarters with my little pincers. Don’t smash or shatter the ice: it’ll become watery in a moment. Put three or four more cracked cubes into our glasses, to begin the chill. Put the gin or the vodka into the pitcher, then wet the neck of the vermouth bottle with a quickly amputated trickle. Stir the Martini vigorously but without sloshing. When the side of the pitcher is misted like a January windowpane pour the drink into the glasses. Don’t allow any of the ice in the pitcher to join the awaiting, unmelted ice in the glass. (My friend likes his straight up, so I’ll throw away the ice in his glass. But I save it in my own, because a Martini on the rocks stays cold longer, and I’ve avoided the lukewarm fourth or fifth sip from the purer potion.) Now stir the drink inside the iced glass, just once around. Squeeze the lemon peel across the surface—you’ve already pared it, from a fat, bright new lemon—and then run the peel, skin-side down, around the rim of the glass before you drop it in. Serve. Smile. ♦