The Big Oyster (29 page)

The late nineteenth century
was sometimes called the Gilded Age, the age of the robber barons who ruthlessly amassed fortunes building banks, railroads, steel and other industry without fair-practice regulations, a unionized labor force, or a fair share of the tax burden. Nor did they have regulations or restrictions on what they discharged into the earth, into the air, or into the water, including the Hudson, Raritan, Newark, and other rivers that flow into New York Harbor.
The History of New York,
an 1884 book by Benson J. Lossing, warned:

New York, unfortunately, is becoming to a large degree a city of only two conspicuous classes, the rich and the poor. The great middle class, which constitutes the bone and sinew of the social structure, have been squeezed out, as it were, by the continually increasing pressure of the burden of the cost of living in the city.

In 1898, New York became the second largest city in the Western world after London, when Manhattan merged with Brooklyn, already the third largest U.S. city, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Many Manhattanites laughed at the notion that a resident of anyplace but Manhattan could be called a New Yorker. New York City had a population of about 2.5 million and consumed as many as a million oysters a day, which would be the equivalent of every New Yorker consuming more than a dozen oysters every month—along with startling quantities of lobsters, steak, champagne, and cigars.

The wealthy came to Manhattan and spent ostentatiously. A new kind of restaurant appeared in New York to serve them the seafood they were polluting. They were called lobster palaces. They could just as easily have been called oyster palaces except that one doesn't name a palace after a twenty-five-cent item.

Julian Street, a popular journalist of the epoch, wrote an article for
Everybody's Magazine
titled “Lobster Palace Society” in which he compared the people of standing and the people without it. When a truly consequential guest dined at a lobster palace, he didn't pay but simply signed the bill. It would be settled later on a monthly basis. “Check-signing is one of the most impressive rites,” said Street. On the other hand, what could be worse than what Street called “getting the rope.” A velvet rope separated the maître d' from the dining hall, and if he chose not to seat someone, the rope stayed closed. This was Street's satire of the death of a lobster-palace habitué, whom he calls “Mr. Feldman.”

While Mr. Feldman lives, he lives very high, and when he comes to die, he does it so quickly that he actually interrupts himself in the midst of ordering another bottle. His colour changes. If he was purple, he turns mauve; if cream-coloured, a lovely shade of pale green. An attentive waiter catches him as he starts to flop over on the wine cooler. He has stopped ordering, so his friends know he must be dead.

The Waldorf-Astoria was one of the palaces frequented by J. Pierpont Morgan. Business deals were made at the bar, and a million dollars could change hands in an all-night baccarat game in one of the private rooms. In the dining room, with white-tie attire required, dinner began with enormous quantities of oysters and then moved on to a half-dozen more courses.

The most famous of the lobster-palace gourmands was James Buchanan Brady, popularly known as Diamond Jim for the gems with which he adorned himself—“them that has them wears them,” he would say of diamonds. He was a New Yorker from a working-class Irish family, raised in a tough Irish neighborhood on Manhattan's Lower West Side. His first job was as a baggage handler for the New York Central at the Spuyten Duyvil station at a time when railroads were the most prominent and fastest-growing industry in America.

As he worked his way up, Brady became enamored of Chauncey Depew, the New York Central president and reputedly one of the best-dressed men in New York. Brady started going to Depew's tailors and haberdashers, even though he could barely afford them. “If you are going to make money, you have to look like money,” he said. And that is what he did as the salesman for a company that made a handsaw for cutting rails, a technological marvel in an age of expanding rail lines. He became its most successful railroad-equipment salesman, known for his dogged courting of clients. He started at the lobster palaces, taking clients there on an expense account. His favorite was Rector's, occupying a two-story building with a yellow facade on the east side of Broadway between Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets. Rector's had sixty waiters and eight captains, and of all the palaces, this was the one known for hosting out-of-town millionaires, the nouveaux riches whose copper mines, railroad lines, and steel mills had just paid off in legendary fashion.

Unlike most of the lobster palaces, which had French names or mythically New York names such as Astor, Knickerbocker, or Gotham, Rector's garish hall of mirrors was simply named after its owner. Charles Rector was a Civil War veteran into whose home, by chance, the fatally wounded Abraham Lincoln had been carried. His brother had died at Fredricksburg. His father owned a famous hotel and restaurant along the Erie Canal. After the war, Charles Rector worked for George Pullman, one of the railroad barons, and was put in charge of the first Pullman hotel dining car to cross the North American continent. He then started Rector's Oyster House on Clark and Munroe streets in Chicago, one of the famous Chicago houses that brought in Eastern oysters by rail. He was the first to ship in fresh oysters in the shell, Rockaways. He was also the first to bring live lobsters to Chicago. In 1899, Rector relocated to New York. All the Western barons who came to New York already knew Rector from Chicago. The restaurant had the reputation of serving the same-quality food as Delmonico's without the old-school formality and with slightly more reasonable prices.

In an age when men wore diamonds in their evening clothes, when they turned out at night sparkling, Brady sparkled a little more, his stones a little bigger. It was estimated that he owned $2 million in evening jewelry. Some of his large stones were mounted in platinum in the shape of bicycles, automobiles, trains, and planes—“the transportation set.” It was also estimated that he gave away, mostly to “lady friends,” another $2 million in jewels. He would give out $1,000 party favors.

Brady would also make companies overnight. He gave a chocolate maker $150,000 to expand after eating a five-pound box. “Best goddamned candy I ever ate.” He was a legendary glutton. A teetotaler, he was said to begin a meal with a gallon of orange juice and six dozen Lynnhaven oysters. The choice of Lynnhavens was typical of his gourmandism. A Chesapeake oyster, it was considered bland but had the distinction of being extremely large. He would then reputedly move on to crabs, turtles, ducks, steaks, maybe a partridge, and perhaps a twelve-egg soufflé for dessert.

When he learned that everyone in Paris was talking about a sole-and-oyster dish at the Café Marguery, he demanded that Charles Rector add it to his repertoire. Rector yanked his son, George, out of Cornell and sent him to Paris to get the recipe. After eating the dish at Rector's, Brady said, “George, that sole was marvelous. I've had nine helpings and even right now, if you poured some of the sauce over a Turkish towel, I believe I could eat all of it.” Rector assumed this was praise. This was the dish as served at Rector's:

   
Fillet of Sole Marguery à la Diamond Jim

Have 2 flounders filleted. Place bones, skin, and heads in stewpan. Add 1 pound inexpensive fish cleaned and cut into small pieces, ½ cup thinly sliced young carrots, and a small chopped leek, 3 sprigs of parsley, 10 whole peppercorns, 1 small bay leaf, 1 sprig of thyme, 1½ quarts cold water. Bring to a boiling point very slowly and simmer until liquid is reduced to one pint, then strain through fine cheese cloth. Place filets in buttered baking pan and pour over one cup fish stock. Season with sprinkling of salt and pepper, and place in moderate oven (325© F) 15 to 20 minutes. Carefully lift fillet from pan and arrange on hot ovenproof serving platter. Garnish with 1 dozen poached oysters and 1 dozen boiled shrimps which have been shelled and cleaned. Pour remaining fish stock into baking pan in which fillets were poached and simmer gently until quantity is reduced to 3 or 4 tablespoons, no more. Strain into top part of double boiler and add 4 tablespoons dry white wine, ¼ pound butter. Cook over hot water, stirring until butter is melted. (Have very little water in the lower part of double boiler, just enough to create a gentle steam.) Add 4 egg yolks which have been well beaten. Stir continuously until sauce is the consistency of a medium cream sauce. Pour this creamy sauce over fish fillets, oysters, and shrimps, and place under broiler flame until nicely glazed or lightly browned. Allow one fillet per serving.

More impressive than his jewelry was the woman seen on his arm, the actress Lillian Russell, billed as “the English Ballad Singer.” In fact, she was Helen Louise Leonard of Iowa and had in common with Brady both fame and humble origins. Despite an enduring friendship through various marriages for both of them, a man as intent on show as the obese and bejeweled salesman Brady must have enjoyed being regularly seen with someone often regarded as the world's most beautiful woman. They would be flooded in lights at the entrance to Rector's, the red and round Diamond Jim and the curvaceous and radiant Miss Russell announced by a Hungarian Gypsy violin band and the bow of the headwaiter as they were ushered in away from the view of the masses and into the view of the privileged. Press photos were sometimes labeled “beauty and the beast.”

George Rector called the two his twenty-five best customers, and according to him and popular legend, they ate enormous meals. In an age of fleshiness, Russell was admired for her shapely pudginess, though it expanded more every year. Supposedly Brady said, “I always make it a point to leave just four inches between my stomach and the edge of the table and then when I can feel 'em rubbin' together pretty hard I know I've had enough.”

Or was it all just a myth?

Oscar Tschirky, who ran the dining room at the Waldorf, remembered being a young immigrant in 1883 when he happened to be passing Delmonico's as a young trim Lillian Russell was rushing in:

I remember the smooth flow of her blue gown, the exotic effect of her golden hair, but most of all the banked-down fire that smoldered in her beautiful face. She was the loveliest woman I had ever seen.

The next day he applied for a job as a busboy in Delmonico's. Years later, when Tschirky was the waiter in charge of Delmonico's private rooms, Diamond Jim Brady came in to have a private dinner with Lillian Russell and he waited on them. The waiter found Brady, with his diamond stickpin, diamond-headed cane, and diamond rings, “warm, friendly, and jovial.” He knew Brady's reputation and was ready with oysters by the dozen and double portions of everything. But he was shocked and a bit crushed to discover that Miss Russell ate even more than Diamond Jim.

Tschirky, who went on to serve him many times in Delmonico's and later when he ran the dining room at the Waldorf, said that he usually ate what he ate that first night: one dozen raw oysters, a filet mignon with a green vegetable, and a slice of apple pie or watermelon when in season. The only thing he drank was orange juice. In the nineteenth century, one dozen oysters was considered a modest portion. Russell also ate a dozen oysters, but then she ate soup, fish, a main dish, a roast, two vegetables, sherbet, game, salad, ice cream, cake, and coffee. All accompanied by vintage wines. She was one of those American eaters Europeans used to write about. He was not.

Tschirky called it “the surprise and disillusionment of my life.”

It could have been that the round and sad-faced Brady had taken up dieting. It was well known, from the spectacle it created, that he and Russell attempted to trim down by taking up the new New York craze, bicycling. The chain-driven bicycle with two equal-size wheels was developed in the 1880s and soon Central Park and city streets were filled with cyclists. It was said that so many bicycle lamps glowed in Manhattan streets at night that the streets appeared to be “filled with fireflies.” City newspapers were brimming with angry editorials about “blazing”—reckless bicycling—though it seemed doubtful that New York's most celebrated elephantine couple were blazers. Feminists and suffragettes including Susan B. Anthony were excited about bicycles as a mode of transportation that fostered sexual equality and female independence. In fact, Russell took it up first, pedaling through Central Park dressed in white with fellow actress Marie Dressler. Afterward, they would defy sexual decorum by smoking cigarettes behind drawn curtains. When pounds started disappearing from Russell, Brady took up the sport, ordering a dozen gold-plated bicycles made with diamond-encrusted handlebars for him and her friends to be seen pedaling through the park.

Despite Tschirky's recollection of Diamond Jim, George Rector insisted in his memoirs that Brady ate Homeric quantities. He certainly looked as if he did and so did Russell. She was so tightly trussed it seemed all the fleshiness of her body had been pushed up to her soft and fleshy arms. As one chronicler of Delmonico's, Lately Thomas, quipped, New Yorkers always wanted to see her and they got to see “more and more.”