From its contested origins in nineteenth-century California; through its popularity among the smart set of the 1930s, world leaders of the 1940s, and the men in the gray flannel suits of the 1950s; to its resurgence among today's retro-hipsters: Lowell Edmunds traces the history and cultural significance of the cocktail H. L. Mencken called "the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet."

Lowell Edmunds is a professor of classics at Rutgers University

Chapter One

MESSAGE ONE

The Martini is American-- it is not European, Asian, or African

America, when he first visited it in 1958, impressed him ... as a land of milk and martinis.-- GEORGE WATSON, 1997

American presidents wielded the Martini in meetings with their Soviet counterparts in the 1940s and 1950s. The cocktail also played a role in less serious diplomatic games. In May 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson went by way of Paris to a meeting of NATO's Council of Ministers in London. He intended, as a courtesy, to hold informal talks with the French foreign minister, Robert Shuman, in advance of the meeting in London. Shuman surprised him by outlining a plan to place the entire French-German production of coal and steel under a joint authority, and he swore Acheson to secrecy. It therefore happened that when Ernest Bevin, the English secretary of state for foreign affairs, learned of the plan, he believed that Acheson had deliberately concealed it from him. Bevin flew into a rage, and only with great difficulty were the former good relations between him and Acheson restored. But, says Acheson, "Bevin had his revenge." Shortly before Acheson's return to the United States, Bevin invited him to drop by at the end of the day:

"I know you like a Martini," said Ernie, "and it's hard to get a good one in London." Something was definitely afoot. I expressed guarded anticipation. At Bevin's signal, an ancient butler began operations at a sideboard. With growing disbelief I watched him pour into a tumbler one-third gin, one-third Italian vermouth, and one-third water without ice, then bring the tumbler to me on a tray.

    Ernie was observing all this with what he thought was a Mona Lisa smile--but was more like the grin of a schoolboy up to deviltry.

    It was clear that I could never drink this horror if I tasted it. The only course was to take it in one gulp, or call "uncle." I chose the former, and down it went.

    "Have another," Ernie almost commanded.

    "No, thank you," I said. "No one could make another just like that one."

In the 1990s, it was still difficult to get a good Martini in London. Christopher Fildes wrote in the Spectator , "The two dollar martini has brushed against my lips like an angel's kiss. At teatime on Monday the magic figure flashed up on the screen: 1 [pounds sterling] = $2. It was my signal to fly the Atlantic and lap up martinis while such a mad exchange rate lasted." The Qeen Mother was more efficient. Instead of going to the United States, she went to an American in England. R. W. Apple Jr., now Washington bureau chief of the New York Times , attended a dinner at Fleur Cowles's in London in the early 1980s when he was on assignment there. Another of the guests was the Queen Mother. During cocktails a butler approached Apple and said that the Queen Mother would like to see him:

"God, I thought", recalls Apple, "I have committed some giant gaff". She said, "Young man, I take it from your accent that you are an American", and I said, "Guilty". "I presume, then, that you know how to make a dry Martini". I said, "Yes, ma'am", and she said, "Go with this man to the kitchen and show him how. Eleven to one, please."

Any American, or at least any American important enough to be at the same dinner party with the Queen Mother, will know how to make a dry Martini.

    The American Martini-drinker, going to Europe, is in trouble. The impossibility of getting a dry Martini in any but the best hotels in the largest European capitals is an oft-repeated traveler's tale. You asked for gin and vermouth and got them mixed half and half, without ice, and the vermouth was red. You asked for gin and vermouth with ice, and you got one small lump of ice floating on the surface of an obscure cocktail occupying the lower regions of a tall glass.

    The essayist M. F. K. Fisher devoted a whole article to the problem of ordering a dry Martini in France. She held that the Martini begins to deteriorate even while the traveler is still in transit: "The same rule applies by air and by sea: subtly and irrevocably the cocktail becomes more wine and less liquor the nearer one gets to Europe." She explains that in France you must ask for "Martini-gin," pronounced "martini-zheen," and then explain the proportions of gin and vermouth and the extreme importance of ice.

    European ignorance of the Martini, this time the Germans', is the basis of a joke set in the time of World War II:

At a certain point in the War, the Germans established a top-secret school in which they trained spies for work in England. In this school, the future spies received not only the usual technical training but also a thorough education in all aspects of English culture and, at the same time, had their English accents honed to perfection. Two of the finest products of this school were chosen for a special mission and were set ashore from a U Boat on a sparsely populated coast of England. They found a road and walked into a country town. Since it was now evening, they went into a pub for dinner, and at the bar they ordered two Martinis. The bartender asked them, "Dry?" "Nein, nein," shouted one of the Germans, " Zwei !"

If the Martini is not European, still less is it Asian, even in the hands of Asians within the United States. Peter Anderson, a columnist for the Boston Globe , said, "I do not order Martinis in Chinese restaurants." Writers can make dramatic capital out of the unexpectedness of the Martini in an Asian setting. A Martini-drinking scene is laid in the out-of-the-way Indian town of Amarpur in Pearl S. Buck's Mandala (1970). Jagat, an ex-rajah, is entertaining the American Miss Brooke Westley, who has gone to Amarpur after meeting Jagat in New Delhi. The worldly and imperious Jagat handles the cocktail hour as follows:

    "Well, what shall we have?" Jagat inquired.

    "Nothing for me, thank you, Jagat," the Maharani said.

    "Oh, come now," he exclaimed. "A martini? Ranjit has learned to make them very well."

    His voice was edged with impatience and she bowed her head and was silent.

    "A martini for the Rani," Jagat ordered, "and--why not the same for all of us? Come, come--"

Ranjit's Martini has an exotic touch, in keeping with the locale:

[Brooke] took her glass ... and sipped the martini. It was excellent, very dry, and with a flavor she did not know. Suddenly she decided to cast aside her shyness and be herself.

    "What is this flavor?" she inquired to Jagat. "It is like flowers, but not any that I know."

    "It is a citrus that long ago was brought here from Greece by my grandfather," Jagat replied. "It bears a small bitter fruit, but when pressed this fruit has an extraordinary essence, a flavor that is more like flowers than fruit. We make the essence every year and bottle it--at least I suppose we do--it's more in Moti's [his wife's, the Maharani's] realm than mine, eh, my dear?"

Jagat's, or Ranjit's, Martini is thus suitably Oriental, and the Martini, unexpected in India ("Ranjit has learned to make them very well"), turns out to be as exotic as the setting.

    In W. S. Maugham's "The Fall of Edward Barnard" (1921), Bateman Hunter goes out to bring back his friend, Edward Barnard, who has strangely overstayed his two-year job in Tahiti. It emerges that Edward has gone native and has adopted an amoralist philosophy under the influence of an older American, Arnold Jackson, an ex-convict who has settled in Tahiti, married a native, and had a daughter by her. To Bateman's horror, he finds that Edward's only ambition is to marry this mulatto, raise coconuts, and contemplate the beauty of the islands. The truth begins to dawn on Bateman at dinner at Jackson's, where he meets the beautiful mulatto, and gets a dose of Jackson's philosophy. Dinner is preceded by cocktails, which are mixed, to Bateman's consternation, by the girl:

It did not put him at his ease to see this sylph-like thing take a shaker and with a practiced hand mix three cocktails.

    "Let us have a kick in them, child," said Jackson.

    She poured them out and smiling delightfully handed one to each of the men. Bateman flattered himself on his skill in the subtle art of shaking cocktails and he was not a little astonished, on tasting this one, to find that it was excellent. Jackson laughed proudly when he saw his guest's involuntary look of appreciation.

    "Not bad, is it? I taught the child myself, and in the old days in Chicago I considered that there wasn't a bar-tender in the city that could hold a candle to me. When I had nothing better to do in the penitentiary I used to amuse myself by thinking out new cocktails, but when you come down to brass-tacks there's nothing to beat a dry Martini."

    Bateman felt as though someone had given him a violent blow on the funny-bone and he was conscious that he turned red and then white.

One could call this the Heart of Darkness Martini. Bateman's reaction is intense because of his extreme conventionality. He does not expect a child, much less a female child, still less a female mulatto child, to be able to mix a Martini. But he is reacting more immediately to Arnold Jackson's vaunt. The ex-convict, a Martini-man--the Martini is uncivilized and tough (Ambiguities 1 and 4)--has turned the world upside down by appropriating the American cocktail for his exotic Tahitian existence. Bateman, a young businessman, the representative of every middle-class virtue, and also a connoisseur of the Martini--the Martini is civilized and sensitive--has come to bring a fellow American home from Tahiti. He is staggered by Jackson's words because he realizes that Jackson has been able, in a stroke of miniature imperialism, to bring America to Tahiti. This realization comes to him in the form of the Martini.

    A half-century later the device--child mixes Martini for Americans in the Far East--is still effective. This time we are in Korea. In the film M*A*S*H (1970), which sired a television series of great longevity, the first Martini scene occurs approximately sixteen minutes into the film. The army surgeons Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt), clad in fatigues, sitting in their scruffy tent, are drinking Martinis in stemmed glasses. The Martinis have been made by their servant, John-Ho (sometimes called Ho-John), a Korean teenager. One of their comrades (Robert Duvall), a fervent Christian who is improbably praying while they drink, disapproves of their teaching the boy to mix Martinis. The boy nervously departs saying, "I go wash clothes." Duke compliments him as he leaves: "You mix a mean Martini." (Later Hawkeye says to him, of another Martini, "Fine of kind, Ho-John.")

Chapter Two

MESSAGE TWO

The Martini is urban and urbane-- it is not rural or rustic

The martini is a city dweller, a metropolitan. It is not to be drunk beside a mountain stream or anywhere else in the wilds, not in the open there or even indoors.-- BERNARD DEVOTO, 1951

The nineteenth-century cocktail was unceremonious. Patsy McDonough wrote in his Bar-keeper's Guide of 1883, "It is a welcome companion on fishing excursions, and travelers often go provided with it on railroad journeys." In an advertisement in Puck in the 1890s, Heublein listed the places where its "Club Cocktails," which included Martinis, might be drunk:

For the Yacht,

   For the Sea Shore,

     For the Mountains,

For the Fishing Party,

   For the Camping Party,

     For the Summer Hotel.

But the Martini Cocktail did not take these directions, except, perhaps, for the last. It became, instead, a city dweller. Just as the Martini, originally sweet, became dry, so it exchanged a rural for an urban identity very early on.

    The most famous expression of the urbanism of the Martini is the saying once attributed to Alexander Woollcott, "Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini." The voice is that of a city dweller. Barnaby Conrad's recent research showed that in Every Day's a Holiday (1937) the actor Charles Butterworth said to another character in the film, "You ought to get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini." The screenplay was written by Mae West, who now gets the credit for this most famous Martini saying. But Billy Wilder told a columnist for the Los Angeles Times that Butterworth had first spoken the line of himself when he fell into a pool at the Garden of Allah, a resort in Hollywood. Mae West would have known the line, which became an instant proverb, and appropriated it for her film. This attribution replaces an earlier one: Robert Benchley, or rather his press agent siring it on Benchley.

    A joke, perhaps the most prevalent of all Martini jokes, is built on the antithesis of city and wilderness. A sailor cast up on a desert island, a fighter pilot downed in a jungle, a hunter lost in the woods--it can be anyone isolated in the wild--has an emergency kit. The contents of the kit are, of course, gin, vermouth, a jar of olives, and perhaps even some means of producing ice. No sooner does the sailor, or whoever it may be, begin to mix his Martini than several natives, or other hunters, or whoever, emerge from nowhere and tell him that that's no way to make a Martini. The joke depends not only upon the notorious principle of Martini-mixing, quot homines tot sententiae , but upon the idea that the Martini is inseparable from communal life--in effect, inseparable from the city. If Wolcott Gibbs took a silver shaker of Martinis onto the beach at Fire Island, was it not a sort of umbilical connecting him with Manhattan?

    The urbanism of the Martini was expressed as aptly as possible by Cole Porter in "Two Little Babes in the Wood," which was first performed in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1924. The lyrics tell how two orphans are left to the care of a wicked uncle who abandons them in the wood in order to get their inheritance for himself. The birds build the girls a nest, and the wind sings a lullaby. A rich man in a sedan drives by and finds them. "Then he drove them down to New York town." He gives them clothes and jewelry. In a trice the girls have too many cars and too many beaux and are going to too many parties:

They have found that the fountain of youth

Is a mixture of gin and vermouth

And the whole town's agreed

That the last thing in speed

Is the two little babes in the wood.

So ends the song. The Martini is the climax of the urban transformation of the babes in the wood.

    In 1976 a little-known politician from Plains, Georgia, running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States, was drawing attention to himself with a populist attack on tax loopholes. One of his targets was badly chosen. He denounced the tax-deductible, expense-account lunch as the "$50 Martini lunch." This expression somehow became "the three-Martini lunch," and the candidate's position became the butt of jokes, cartoons, editorials, and general derision. On Friday, February 17, 1978, in his press conference in Cranston, Rhode Island, President Jimmy Carter recanted, at least with regard to the Martinis: "As for the famous three-Martini lunch, I don't care how many Martinis anyone has with lunch, but I am concerned about who picks up the check." He had learned that the Martini has such an established character for urbanity and refinement that anyone who attacks it identifies himself as a bumpkin.

    One of the jokes that Carter inspired encapsulates this message of the Martini. A reporter following candidate Carter through the South goes into a bar in a small rural town. He sits down and orders a Martini. The bartender asks, "With or without?" "With or without what?" asks the reporter. The bartender replies, "Grits."

Copyright © 1998 Lowell Edmunds. All rights reserved.