Imbibe! (5 page)

If his chosen profession or the prizefights, or the towns he tended to gravitate to, or the fact that he always seemed to have a book running out of his bar (if it wasn’t horse, it was riflery contests, elections, or any other damn thing you could put money on), or the Parisian gold watch he always wore with the golden seal, sovereign, and “dog’s head” on the other end of its heavy gold chain, or his close involvement with the theater and its folk aren’t enough to mark Jerry Thomas as a member of the sporting fraternity, that bit with the $16,000, the kid gloves, and the select company should be a dead give-away. Considering that room and board at the Astor House, New York’s best hotel, went for two dollars a night and dinner with rare wines at Delmonico’s might conceivably cost as much as five, for Thomas to blow such a sum in the few months between his return from California and his employment at the Mills House speaks to a serious dedication to amusement. Either that or sports betting.

One thing Mark Twain was wrong about: He considered keeping a saloon to be “the cheapest and easiest way to become an influential man and be looked up to.” Tell that to the New York barkeeper George Augustus Sala described in an 1853 article in Dickens’s popular journal,
Household Words
:

 

Admittedly, Sala might be laying it on a bit thick, but only a bit (and knowing Sala, who always displayed a detailed curiosity in the American mixological arts, he was only half kidding about wanting to be a barkeeper). If the efforts of Willard and Cato and Shed Sterling had established the basic techniques and procedures of mixing individual drinks
a la minute
, the mixologists of the 1850s lit the afterburners. Clearly, to preside over a bar like this—although the
Brooklyn Eagle
identified it as the St. Nicholas, the description could apply just as well to the Metropolitan—one needed formidable skills. But one also had to be a sporting character of wide experience and infinite jest; as the
Chicago Tribune
noted in 1870, a good barkeeper

 

Jerry Thomas was just that. For the next eighteen years, all those skills and the jest that went with them would keep him in the limelight as America’s most famous bartender.

His run at the top started off auspiciously enough when, after a couple years at the Metropolitan and a quick sporting jaunt to London (the Heenan-Sayers fight; according to what he told Alan Dale, this was only the first of many visits), the thirty-year-old Thomas opened his own place, just a couple of blocks up from the Metropolitan at 622 Broadway. This elaborate establishment was in the same building as Laura Keene’s New Theater and probably, as was customary, attached to it. Certainly La Keene (the most popular actress of her day, and the only one to run her own theater company) displayed no conspicuous Temperance proclivities that would have prevented the usual connection being made. In which case Thomas might have noticed, one night in 1861, an intense, dreamy-eyed man on the edge of middle age pop in for a quick Gin Cocktail or Santa Cruz Sour. Some old friends of Stephen Foster’s were in town from Pittsburgh and had managed to extricate the songwriter, then just beginning his final slide into destitution and death, from the East Side liquor groceries where he was killing himself on adulterate rum. After dinner at the St. Nicholas, they treated him to a play at Laura Keene’s. I can’t imagine Foster handling the second half without a bracer.

Foster wasn’t the only celebrity to come within the Professor’s orbit at 622. In October 1860, Queen Victoria’s son Edward, the Prince of Wales, visited New York. The reception he received was overwhelming—for a free people, Americans of the day were shocking royalists. Poor Edward’s hotel, the Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third and Fifth, was so besieged by crowds that he was essentially trapped there.

In 1902, however, an old newshound by the name of George Forrester Williams published an interesting story to the effect that one night during the prince’s visit, he and Mortimer Thomson, a fellow scribe who had achieved a fair degree of fame for the dialect humor he wrote under the pseudonym “Doesticks,” managed to achieve a private audience with His Royal Highness. Upon perceiving how miserable the man was to be trapped in his hotel, they suggested sneaking him out the back way for a quick tour of the neighborhood. He immediately assented (for more on the prince, see the Prince of Wales’s Cocktail, in Chapter 7). Since the crowd was watching the front—royalty doesn’t use the back door—things went off without a hitch. The trio stalked briskly down Twenty-third Street toward Sixth Avenue, a street of saloons, gambling-houses, minstrel theaters, dance halls, and oyster houses. Real New York. As they turned up Sixth, Doesticks posed the question: “Have you ever drunk a mint julep, sir?”

No, the prince had not. Yes, he would. And here’s the kicker: “Thomson led the prince into a famous barroom presided over by the no less famous Jerry Thomas, one of the greatest artists in his line or time.” His Royal Highness watched the “elaborate and picturesque style of manufacture practiced by the mixers of elixirs in those antebellum days with profound curiosity and admiration,” took a sip, said, “Why, it’s only a lemonade, after all,” revised his opinion as the Julep-glow suffused him, and pronounced it “very, very nice.” End of anecdote. Now, if there were ever two people who should have met, they were the Prince of Wales and Jerry Thomas; they had much in common, from a deep curiosity into the composition of drinks to an interest in the operation of the rules of probability to an unshakable personal dignity leavened with humor. But the details, the details. What was Thomas doing up there on Sixth Avenue when his bar down Broadway was open? And why is there no other record of this bar? And, most of all, what the hell was he doing putting lemon in his Julep? Other than that, the story is possible. But Williams might not have told the whole of it (and, for the record, there are plenty of lemon Juleps to be found in the literature).

But according to one Richard Doolittle, a New York businessman, the outing was rather wilder than Williams, who has things ending quickly and sedately, let on. As Doolittle recalled in 1892, the prince and his party ended up downtown, rather worse for the wear, and—as happens in these situations—got separated. “The heir to Britain’s throne wandered, unattended, into a . . . resort and proceeded to make things pretty lively,” whereupon “the bartender started in to squelch him, and would have done so effectually had I not taken charge of the roisterer and piloted him back to his party.”

Jerry Thomas’s bar was downtown, it should be noted, and I doubt he was disposed to take any guff from splificated customers, heirs to the throne or not.

It was while he was at 622 Broadway that Thomas did something no American bartender had ever done before and put the unruly mass of formulae that every skilled mixologist carried around in his head down on paper. Barkeepers tended to regard their recipes as trade secrets, not to be exposed to the
vulgus profanum
. For whatever reason, though, Jerry Thomas broke the mold. (Rather than clog things up here with a detailed discussion of his book, its genesis and its fortunes, I’ve put all that in Appendix I.) The book certainly didn’t hurt his star power, anyway, on the strength of which he was able to go to the Occidental in San Francisco in 1863, as we have seen. Why he would want to leave a thriving bar of his own to do so is another question. Perhaps the Leland brothers, who ran both that hotel and the Metropolitan and hence knew his work well, simply made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

But I suspect that there was more to it: In the summer of 1863, as the Civil War was raging, the draft came to New York, and Jerry Thomas was highly eligible. The sporting milieu he was a part of looked unkindly on the war to begin with, and a bolt-hole in San Francisco must have seemed pretty attractive. Even more attractive, however, was the vast and vulgar spectacle that was unfolding two hundred miles to the east in Virginia City, Nevada, where a city of thirty thousand had sprung up overnight on top of the massive mountain of silver known as the Comstock Lode. By 1864, Thomas was there, either (as local legend has it) at the famous Delta Saloon or at the Spalding Saloon on C Street, where the City Directory found him—or, of course, at both. Wherever he wielded his shaker, he would’ve known local newspaperman Samuel Clemens, who was then just beginning his literary career and didn’t think a Whiskey Cocktail would bite, much. Unfortunately, the
Territorial Enterprise
, Twain’s paper, burned in one of Virginia City’s frequent fires, and all its archives and most of its back issues with it.

In 1865, as soon as the shooting stopped, Jerry Thomas was back in New York, operating a saloon with his brother, George, at the very fashionable address of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, just south of Madison Square. The space, at 937 Broadway, was “a narrow strip about 15 feet wide and 150 feet deep,” as the
New York Times
described it, that ran through the block and had a second entrance on Fifth. “It was a great place,” the Professor recalled in 1882.

 

Between the art and the drinks and the free lunch and the steaks and chops and the funhouse mirrors, for a few years there the Thomas brothers ran what was probably the most famous freestanding bar in America. According to an 1871 article in
Appleton’s Magazine
, it was a “favorite resort of the American
jeunesse doreé
” and, after the bar at the nearby Fifth Avenue Hotel, “probably the most frequented place after dark” in the city.

Things were so good that for once the Professor stayed put. In fact, in 1867 he even got married. Henrietta Bergh Waites, a New York City native, was a widow some five years younger than her husband with a teenage daughter, also named Henrietta. Before long, she had another child to take care of: Milton, or Minturn—records differ—was born the next year. A daughter, Louise, followed some three years after that. For a time, anyway, Jerry Thomas was a family man and successful businessman—a proper Victorian. He even took to joining things—he turned up as a member of the stuffy Wine & Spirit Traders’ Society and the rather less tony Fat Men’s Association (at a portly but still mobile 205 pounds, he was one of the lightest members).

As the Professor’s reminiscences suggest, he had more than a passing interest in the contemporary equivalent of pop art—indeed, his place was “a museum as well as a bar,” to quote
Apple-ton’s
, containing “all, or nearly all, the caricatures of celebrities, painted by Nast for the
bal d’opéra
a few years ago; to these a good many additions have been made, so that Jerry Thomas’s comic gallery is as well visited and appreciated as the exhibitions of the National Academy.” And well it might be—the walls of his saloon displayed caricatures of all the political and theatrical figures of the day, drawn by the most popular artists. Nast, though, was the star; the most celebrated and controversial caricaturist of his day, through his platform in
Harper’s
magazine he was a political and cultural force to be reckoned with. When he did your caricature, you’d best make sure you saw it, and many of his subjects—e.g., Ulysses S. Grant—did just that.

It couldn’t have hurt Thomas’s collecting that he was an artist himself. When Hingston encountered him at the Occidental, he noted that Thomas “is clever also with his pencil . . . and behind his bar are specimens of his skill as a draughtsman.” Indeed, according to Thomas his work,
“
Jerry Thomas’s ‘Original Dream,’ which is a vision of all the famous men and women of America sitting together in three tiers, . . . tickled P. T. Barnum so much that he came and asked me to make him one like it, only having him, of course, asleep in the big, crimson-cushioned, central arm-chair, instead of me.” It’s one of my fondest hopes that this book spurs some talented researcher in American art to track down one or both of these
Dreams
—and, while he or she is at it, the series of pictures where Nast, according to a contemporary newspaper, “delineated the head-barkeeper [i.e., Thomas] in nine tippling postures colossally.”