Skull and Bones Bonesmen

We love Yale sluts! “No” means “yes,” and “yes” means “anal”—that’s the beastly braying cry at Yale these days. The frat boys from Delta Kappa Epsilon (G. W. Bush’s club) have been accused of taunting female undergraduates in this fashion. Yale requested that the fraternity be shut down for five years.

O, how the mighty have fallen! How can such noisome behavior, base and vile, reek from this once-great flower of American academia? Indeed, lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

In the glory days, no man ever went to Yale to learn anything. God gave us Columbia and Harvard for that. OK, there’s Harold Bloom, but otherwise, Yale was intended for unadulterated gentlemanly pleasure and sport. As Wilde said, “If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough.” Is there anyone around who remembers when Yale was the most splendid, elegant, and gentlemanly of Ivy League colleges; when Andover and St. Paul’s sent their best and brightest to New Haven; when, as Fitzgerald wrote, “Taft and Hotchkiss…prepared the wealth of the Middle West for social success at Yale”?

Where are the Yale men who had their soft tweed jackets and their Oxford-gray flannel trousers made at J. Press and Arthur M. Rosenberg; who trod the Memorial Quadrangle shod in the Raywood-model, full brogue, slip-on Peal shoe and the Oxford-cloth, rolling, button-down-collar Brooks Brothers shirt?

And what’s happened to the tables down at Mory’s, which the 21 Club wished it looked like? And whither the Fence Club, the swellest undergraduate sodality, where Huggins, the club permittee, the white-jacketed Negro gentleman’s gentleman, brooded over his boys with warm breast and, ah, bright wings? Ralph Lauren would have made a mess of himself had he seen such authentic WASP class and décor: stuffed leather chairs, polished mahogany tables, Turkish carpets, and framed pictures of Y-sweatered Eli captains sitting on the Yale Fence.

O, where is the Yale of Skull and Bones, when it was the world’s most prestigious college underground secret society? Admittedly, it always had a meritocratic, hence slightly middle-class, tinge. The fifteen senior “knights” might include such campus big shots as a team captain and the editor of the Yale Daily News, but its graduate patriarchs became presidents, ambassadors, and, most important of all, partners in Brown Brothers Harriman. And where are the modern equivalents of Donald Ogden Stewart, Gerald Murphy, and Brendan Gill, who represented the lefty, artistic wing of the brotherhood—yet gentlemen all?

O, where is the Yale of Bones’ chief rival, Scroll and Key, whose brothers deferentially referred to themselves publicly as second in fame to Bones, knowing full well privately that they were, in fact, the snottiest of senior societies? Like the Order of the Garter, which Lord Melbourne coveted “because there was no damn merit in it,” Scroll and Key preferred aristocratic and moneyed birth over brash achievement. O, where are the likes of Jock Whitney and Paul Mellon, both cringingly shy, and Scroll and Key visions of the beau ideal? And who remembers when Scroll and Key’s idea of an arty-farty brother was the composer of “Eli Yale! Bulldog! Bulldog!” the über-sophisticate, Cole Porter?

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I’ll tell you where all the glory that was Yale has gone—down the toilet, into the cloaca maxima of modern political correctness. Centuries-old tradition has been flushed down the tubes as swiftly as a lowly turd caught in the vortex of a Meyer-Sniffen siphon-jet water closet.

If you want to know all the Decline and Fall stuff about how it happened, you can read The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment by G. Kabaservice (2004).

May it suffice to say that it had to do, beginning in the middle 1960s, with a radical change in admissions criteria—no more bottom-quarter-of-the-class, gentleman-C, old Yalie family types from Andover (G. W. Bush notably proving the rule). Then there was 1969’s introduction of coeducation. Also, the administration embraced the anti-Vietnam War protest (ROTC was squeezed off campus) and was sympathetic to the Black Panthers and other insidious liberal movements. Yale was relieved that New Haven did not have a full-bore revolt and occupation of the university offices as they did at Columbia. Instead, it wasn’t just the president’s office that got trashed there, it was the whole college!

Yale lost so much because it has fallen from such a height. Today’s undergraduate student body is considered meritocratic, diverse to beat the band, and progressive as regards both male and female homosexuality. There aren’t enough preppies to fill a decent club. The Fence has shut its doors. Mr. Huggins’s son became a Black Panther.

To graduates’ dismay, the great senior societies are now all coed and “lean toward ethnicity,” writes Alexandra Robbins in Secrets of the Tomb (2002). The ancient “Tombs” have turned into groups of “overly politically correct hyperventilators” who anguish over perpetuating themselves. In one society at an election of candidates, Robbins reports, a Korean American student threw a tantrum, then “sobbed and stalked out of a meeting because he wanted his slot to go to another Korean rather than an individual of different Asian heritage.” A Chicano member threw a similar fit. “Skull and Bones likewise chases down minority candidates…who fill certain society niches. The woman who is also gay and outspoken, and preferably Native American, is likely to be considered.”

Ties and jackets are gone. It’s all jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts. By looking at him, you can’t tell a modern Yale man from a University of Connecticut townie. God knows what the female undergraduates look like, but “Yale slut” hardly bespeaks knee socks, pleated skirts, McMullen blouses, cashmere cable-knit cardigans, and circle pins. Socially, Yale is in the Ivy League basement. Cornell, Penn, and Columbia, once the redheaded beaten social stepchildren of the Ivy League, now laugh at Yale.

OK, call me a reactionary old fart, but as Talleyrand said, “Qui n’a pas vécu sous l’ancien régime ne connaît pas la douceur de vivre.”

The Gourmand by Louis Léopold Boilly

I just happened to lay my hands on a recent copy of The New York Times’ “Dining & Wine” section that a friend left hanging around. Believe me, I don’t buy the Times. At $2, the copy is no longer good value for starting fires or lining the toucan’s cage.

In typical Times fashion the section had a front-page piece on the culinary taste of one Bobby Seale, 74, former Black Panther chairman, who stood trial for murder and spent two years in the hoosegow for contempt. Guess what—Chairman Seale likes eating “Bobbyque.”

Well, this is the best piece in the section, although there is a lot of Times hand-wringing over dietary guidelines from the federal government, the risks of hypertension, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease arising from a fatty diet. If the Times can’t find a writer who relishes eating, you wonder why they bother with this joyless “Dining & Wine” section. With only four advertisements, it can’t be profitable.

I submit that the word “Dining” is a clue. The only thing worse would be “Fine Dining.” Look out, my friends, when you see these rubriques. Lift your feet, because you are about to be swamped with a mini-tsunami of pretentious bullshit.

Good food writing requires a person with an appetite like the author and glutton Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd. According to The Gossip Family Handbook, he ordered the largest breakfast ever served at London’s Connaught Hotel: porridge, kippers, steak, kidneys, eggs, sausages, bacon, tomatoes, sautéed potatoes, mushrooms, and fruit salad, all washed down with Buck’s Fizz. He was most famous as the “father of the modern obituary” at The Telegraph. He was also briefly the Spectator’s restaurant critic, a gig he gave up after a near-fatal heart attack. That’s what you call devotion to one’s craft.

Another author and glutton was A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker. The best boxing writer since Pierce Egan, he described one of Sugar Ray Robinson’s opponents, a pugilist by the name of Georgie Abrams, as “so hairy that when knocked down he looked like a rug.”

Liebling’s Between Meals (1962) is a classic. He writes that appetite is key. Just look at Proust, he says, whose memory was famously tweaked by eating a madeleine, a cookie with so little brandy it “would not furnish a gnat with an alcohol rub.” In light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, says Liebling, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite: “On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.”

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Liebling died two months after his 59th birthday. It is said that his fingers, toes, and even his ears were disfigured by gout.

Boswell said in 1763 that Dr. Johnson’s appetite “was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible.” The great lexicographer and literary critic was “not a temperate man either in eating or drinking.”

The classical archetype of the glutton or gourmand as writer is perhaps Archestratus, a contemporary of Aristotle, whose poem “Life of Luxury” has come down to us in fragments and references from later writers. He was a dedicated hedonist who, according to James Davidson in Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Ancient Athens, “sailed the known world of his day for the sake of his belly and the parts beneath his belly.” For the scholar seeking further knowledge, Professor Davidson teaches courses in Greek sex and Mediterranean eating at the University of Warwick, Coventry. Fucking and eating; how come they didn’t teach this stuff when I was in college?

Books by chefs are often boring. I’ve read works by Carême, who was known as “King of Chefs and the Chef of Kings,” as well as Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, but for my money these are how-to tomes. The best writers on eating are not the chefs but the trenchermen.

Among the most scintillating was French judge Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who in 1825 published The Physiology of Taste. He formulated the notions that the right order of eating is from the most substantial dish to the lighter and of drinking from mild wine to the headier.

It was this gourmand-philosopher who memorably said, “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are.” And in an obiter dictum that resonates to this day, he warned that “The destiny of nations hangs on the way they feed themselves.”

Christina Aguilera

Aren’t you fed-up with goofy renditions of our national anthem? I refer to the dreadful Miss Aguilera’s butchering of “Oh, say can you see…?” at the Super Bowl.

It’s not so much that she skipped a line—an egregious gaffe—it’s the fact that she chose to render the song in a selfish, solipsistic fashion that was not good and an insult to our country.

To sing the national anthem, to “honor our men and women in uniform,” as the cliché goes, should not allow the singer to draw attention to herself with some kind of original, and in this case, grotesque performance.

The Chinese had it right. To open the Olympics they presented a cute female moppet singing “Ode to the Motherland,” which was in fact lip-synched to another voice by a singer who knew what she was doing.

Why didn’t the NFL pre-record Christina Aguilera to avoid this sort of disaster? The pundits are saying that this was the most important performance of her life—and she blew it. Some mauvaise langues have suggested she was plastered.

While I’m at it, what’s with distracting us before the game with a preposterous reading of parts of the Declaration of Independence? I say “parts” because it has become politically correct to skip the Declaration’s castigation of King George for allying with the “merciless Indian savages.” No one wants to be reminded that your Native Americans fought alongside the British.

Furthermore, bringing up the Revolutionary War before a game where the majority of the players is black is not such a hot idea. It appears that no one at the NFL or the Fox network is aware that more blacks (as many as 20,000) fought with the English than with the colonists. Notably, the Earl of Dunmore, English governor of Virginia, offered freedom to any slave who joined his “Ethiopian Regiment” to fight for the Crown.

All this patriotic stuff is a presumptuous injection of importance into a situation that does not merit it. The Super Bowl had over a hundred million TV viewers—far less than the global audience of some 700 million for soccer’s World Cup final. Besides, the Super Bowl is not the world championship of anything. It’s the final of a game that is only played in the United States. It’s a business, and the guys who run it at a huge profit are keen to present it as a matter of national importance.

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Don’t get me wrong—I’ve served in the Army, and I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but there is a time and a place.

The garish surfeit of American patriotism serves to underscore how parochial the Super Bowl really is. If there were anything international about it like the Olympics, the Tennis Opens, or Formula 1 motor racing, they’d play the winner’s national anthem when the competition is over.

The Super Bowl is a uniquely American, male, pagan festival. To add a feminist touch, the network has the cringingly unfortunate Miss Pam Oliver putting dopey, touchy-feely questions to coaches and players about their state of emotions before, during, and after the game. “How do you feel out there?” Odds are one in a million that this moronic question is likely to produce an interesting or original answer. A woman opining on football reminds me of Dr. Johnson’s observation about a female in the pulpit: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

No, the Super Bowl is a testosterone-charged, cholesterol-fueled, gladiatorial fiesta for the red-blooded, salad-dodging American man. The Financial Times had a laughable sidebar predicting that this year’s Super Bowl fans would be “munching baby carrots and baked lentil crisps…as demand grows for ‘healthy’ snacks.” What a joke. No real man would eat any of that. The AP reported that President Obama at his White House Super Bowl party offered the following heart-stopping menu: “bratwurst, kielbasa, cheeseburgers, deep-dish pizza and Buffalo wings with sides of German potato salad, twice-baked potatoes, and assorted chips and dips”—all washed down with a variety of beers and ales.

You can say what you like about his politics, but Obama knows how to throw a Super Bowl party.

Guess what—many gays aren’t offended at all by the scandalous USS Enterprise video. 

On the contrary, one LGBT website (“The Site with Homosexual Tendencies”) has these comments:

“The video is homoerotic, so I think ‘anti-gay’ is a stretch.” “Ummm…I hardly think this video is anti-gay. It’s actually a green light to get your freak on navy boys. This XO guy is obviously totally gay and he doesn’t hide it very well either. He’s kinda hot in a man-child way.” “Hell, people would probably pay money to see this video if they knew it had sailors showering together.”

There are some negative comments, mostly directed against the Executive Officer (XO), Captain Owen Honors, for wasting his time and government money, and for behaving in a manner unbecoming an officer of high rank, second in command of a nuclear aircraft carrier, the world’s largest naval vessel, responsible for over 5,000 sailors, airmen, and Marines. But on the two gay websites I perused, I saw little anger directed at what the mainstream media is depicting as a maliciously anti-gay video.

This confirms my feeling that this video is, in fact, very gay. It is not merely a farrago of high-seas hijinks and anti-gay jokes as the mainstream media has claimed. As released to the Internet, this is gay pornography. But I don’t think this is what Captain Honors intended, nor am I saying that he is gay. But it sure appears that way, and someone or some folk with an agenda made it look that way. 

Is it possible that certain parties, perhaps upset with the repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” assembled the clips to show how far open homosexuality might lead, at least in the Navy? My understanding is that the XO produced a video every week for more than a year, but it is hard to conceive that it could have been so unremittingly gay on a weekly basis. My suspicion is that this is a compilation of some of the more outrageous scenes, a distillation from a much larger body of work.

Scene One has the XO in a cabin or ward room with “Aviator,” presumably a fighter pilot, and the “SWO,” a Surface Warfare Officer, responsible for the ship’s operation. By some sophisticated videographic means, Captain Honors plays all three roles himself: the XO, the gay-bashing “Aviator,” and the effeminate “SWO-boy.”

“Aviator” lights the fireworks with, “This evening, all of you bleeding hearts—and you, fag SWO-boy (looks his way)—why don’t you just go ahead and hug yourselves for the next twenty minutes or so because there is a really good chance you’re going to be offended.”

This is odd, because the rest of the video is as camp as a row of tents. The so-called anti-gay banter appears, to me anyway, to be quite gay itself. “Aviator” says “fag” the way blacks jokingly sling around “nigger” among themselves.

Scene Two is a digression on the “F-bomb,” a gratuitous use of the word “fuck,” which is plain moronic.

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We then move into the video’s body. We see the XO at his desk simulating masturbation. Here, I put the video on hold for a moment to note that Captain Honors, 49, is often shown with a furry parrot, his plush mascot. The literarily inclined will be reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s Lord Sebastian Flyte and his teddy bear. Students of deviancy will note the suggestion of plushophilia or furry fetishism.

Let’s hit the “play” button and continue the video. Captain Honors is seated in his cabin in a natty, white-piped, Navy-blue dressing gown, cigar in one hand, champagne glass in the other. He uncrosses his bare legs just like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. An editorially inserted blurry patch obscures what may have been a flash of “little XO.”

Then we have a scene of the XO in bed with another man. Could it be the XO himself, his alter ego? Fellini would marvel at this stuff. A condom and some K-Y Jelly are on the night table.

There’s a skit in which the XO is sous la douche with a plastic shower cap on his head—a cringingly effeminate tableau—when he receives a message on his telephone. This causes him to search other showers where he finds two women sailors in one and two tattooed male sailors in another soaping each other up.

Other vignettes feature coprophagy (turd-eating, one step beyond mere coprophilia), a dildo being removed from the head (Navy for toilet), an anal-probe scene in the sick bay, and a man choking his chicken on the commode who splooges simulated semen on his boots. Enough! I can hear the admirals say.

The Navy has sacked Captain Honors. Alas, he’ll never be a rear admiral. As Voltaire said of the Royal Navy, from time to time they execute a senior naval officer “pour encourager les autres.”

Semper ubi sub ubi. —Juvenal

When Dorothy Parker said, “Brevity is the soul of lingerie,” I don’t think she anticipated to what extent the modern woman would take this advice to heart, so to speak.

I’m talking about the reductio ad absurdum of Parker’s apothegm—the thong. I believe Brazilians invented this string-like cache-sex for beachwear. The booty-crazed Cariocas call it fio dental (dental floss). That’s all well and good for the sands of Ipanema and Copacabana, but I have an idea that at the Maidstone Club beach in East Hampton, the tanga would go over like a set of assless chaps at the St. Nicholas Society Christmas Ball.

No, in these latitudes the thong is more often encountered as an undergarment, particularly when the lady wears trousers. This, I am told, is to avoid the highly embarrassing (at least to ladies) “visible panty line.” I’m here to tell you that I (and I would suggest most men) don’t care a whit about VPL. It’s one of those things like makeup and thousand-dollar Manolos that are a big deal with women but which men don’t care about in the least.

If the truth be told (and my unofficial poll so indicates), men find women generally more alluring in skirts or dresses than in trousers. A roué friend told me that this is because when, say, a gentleman is dining in a restaurant and wishes to make a playfully affectionate gesture to his dinner partner, it’s a lot easier for him to get his hand up her skirt than her trouser leg. Women know this and gird themselves accordingly.

The thong under a skirt or dress is altogether another kettle of fish. The most famous instance of this combination’s dangerous consequences was when a certain White House intern flipped up her skirt and flashed her thong at the Horndog-in-Chief. She brought the most powerful man on Earth to his knees.

For a lady to “go commando,” sans undies, is every man’s fantasy and probably the subject of more erotic dreams than Anne Hathaway. It is a phenomenon rarely encountered in real life, at least in the circles where I move. I am told there is a term for the male equivalent: For a gentleman to go without underwear is called “freeballing.”

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It is not to be confused with a cognate technical term that I learned from the Congressional investigation of Tailhook ’91, the notorious Las Vegas naval-aviator jamboree. The official report details the hijinks of our crack Marine Corps Tactical Recon and All-Weather Fighter Attack, carrier jet-pilots. These are the heroes whose mission is to rain shock and awe down on our enemies. On this occasion, to show the sang-froid for which their profession is world-renowned, Top-Gun Marine officers nonchalantly cruised the Hilton Hotel’s corridors with their testicles outside their uniform trousers. Fighter jocks call this specialized maneuver “ballwalking.”

Freeballing aside (it has a slight whiff of lavender), a gentleman normally wears an undergarment that falls into one of two camps—jockeys or boxers. (In the American vernacular: “nut-huggers” or “swing-easies.”) The English, in their colorful way as creators of the common language that separates our two peoples, generally and politely call underpants “smalls” or “undercrackers.” Colloquially, they are known as “kecks,” “trolleys,” and “shreddies,” and vulgarly, “dung-hampers.” The jockey variety is called a “y-front.”

Here’s an example of English usage:

Nurse: Prior to the wedding, we’ll need from His Royal Highness a sample of his blood, urine, stool, and semen.

Equerry to HRH: No worries, sister, I’ll have the valet drop off a pair of his trolleys.

As a note to the aspiring Beau Brummels among my readers, any custom tailor will tell you that he can’t properly fit trousers to a man who wears Speedo-type briefs. Bespoke trousers are cut in an asymmetrical fashion to accommodate what is known in the trade as the “male person” in the relaxed state. So to avoid consternation in Henry Poole’s fitting room, and provided you are not afflicted by priapism like the Marquis de Sade, my advice is—go for the boxers.

These can be made out of a variety of materials, with Sea Island cotton and silk being the most luxurious. A small monogram on the lower left leg is a nice sartorial touch. I knew a man who told me that he had a change pocket incorporated in his custom drawers. Why? I never asked.

Please do not send me any comments about the jock strap’s supposed health benefits for the well-endowed male. If Brahma bulls, bison, and bighorn rams can have appendages that scrape the ground, and if the bull rhinoceros can plow a furrow in the baked African dirt with his pizzle, so can real men let ’em swing easy.

In the 1960s a kind of sport for us Yanks in Paris was making light of our cheese-eating, surrender-monkey hosts.

Dr. Reginald Kernan led the American Mafia at the Travellers Club. He was on the conseil and made sure that the Frogs kept their part of the bargain that the Club maintain its half-Gallic, half-Anglo-Saxon character and composition. 

Reg spoke perfect idiomatic French, if (to the purist ear) with a slightly grating American accent. His idea of a joke was to translate American slang verbatim into French. “Quoi l’enfer donne autour d’ici?” (“What the hell’s going on around here?”), he’d ask as he came into the bar. Or he would say ponderously, “C’est comme ça que le biscuit s’émiette.” (“That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”) In French, neither expression means anything.

Reg was a Boston Brahmin: Milton Academy, Harvard College, a varsity oar, Harvard Medical School. He had been a top doctor at the American Hospital in Paris until he did something that got him sacked, forcing him to sleep in his car for a couple months. Reg was six foot six, slim, and handsome—a dead ringer for Gary Cooper. Before long he was acting in French movies, starring with Simone Signoret and having a love affair with her to boot. He was also more than friendly with the statuesque American model and actress Suzy Parker.

Parker was Chanel’s signature face and the first model to command $200 an hour and make $100,000 a year. She was the rare case of a beauty with wit. Laura Jacobs quoted her in a May 2006 Vanity Fair feature: “I think you can love a man more when you aren’t married to him.” I have an idea this philosophy sat well with Reg. Sadly, her great charm did not radiate to the silver screen. In Kiss Them for Me (1957) with Cary Grant, her performance makes the Tin Woodman look like an Olympic gymnast.

Art Buchwald was the principal literary French-baiter. He had a column on the back page of the Paris International Herald in the days before it was acquired by those mirthless, politically correct bores down on West 42nd Street.

The paper was then owned by Jock Whitney’s New York Herald Tribune and was, some say, the world’s best English-language newspaper. Only about a dozen pages, you could read the whole thing over breakfast. It gave you the feeling of having mastered the world situation. There were the stock tables and the sports scores from America, all the international news, some quirky stuff about Paris, some interesting ads for “private French lessons,” and always an ad for Harry’s New York Bar, 5 Rue Daunou: “Just tell the taxi driver—‘Sank Roo Dough Noo.’”

One of Buchwald’s best columns exposed the myth that the French found big-tipping Americans vulgar. The piece told the tragedy of a maid at the Plaza Athénée who burst into tears when she was over-tipped.

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Every year around Thanksgiving the Herald would print Buchwald’s “Le Grande Thanksgiving,” which purported to explain the unique American holiday to our snail-eating friends. He wrote:

Le Jour de Merci Donnant was first started by a group of Pilgrims (Pelerins) who fled from l’Angleterre before the McCarran Act to found a colony in the New World (le Nouveau Monde) where they could shoot Indians (les Peaux-Rouges) and eat turkey (dinde) to their hearts’ content.

They landed at a place called Plymouth (now a famous voiture Americaine) in a wooden sailing ship called the Mayflower (or Fleur de Mai) in 1620. But while the Pelerins were killing the dindes, the Peaux-Rouges were killing the Pelerins, and there were several hard winters ahead for both of them. The only way the Peaux-Rouges helped the Pelerins was when they taught them to grow corn (mais). The reason they did this was because they liked corn with their Pelerins.

In 1623, after another harsh year, the Pelerins’ crops were so good that they decided to have a celebration and give thanks because more mais was raised by the Pelerins than Pelerins were killed by Peaux-Rouges.

The piece goes on in this wacky fashion to include Miles Standish, or Kilometres Deboutish in French. The full text is available here.

Don’t get me wrong. I laugh at the jokes (see addendum), but I am also an admirer of French literature, gastronomy, and culture.  And who can forget that great French contribution to mankind—the invention of the blow-job. I am aware that France is America’s oldest ally. It is said that the French under the Comte de Rochambeau had more troops deployed at Yorktown than General Washington did. It is certain that the French fleet’s role under the Comte de Grasse was instrumental in securing the British surrender on October 17th, 1781. I wonder whether they stuck around for the grande fête de merci donnant.

Joke #1: WWI German General von Moltke was said to have laughed only twice in his life. The first time was when he was told that his wife had run off with an actor. The second was when an aide told him, “This French position is impregnable.” Taki told me this one.

Joke #2: “I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me.” —General George S. Patton

Joke #3: “Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion.” —Jed Babbin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush I Administration

Now, class, you will remember in this symposium’s first installment that we dealt with the dry martini, the pink gin, and the bullshot, the proper cocktails which mark a gentleman (or lady, I suppose) as a person of breeding, class, and distinction.

I hope you’ll forgive the sexism, but frankly, men are generally better at piss-artistry than women. And when it comes to drinking, you’ll never know what is enough until you know what is too much. As Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. And overdoing it, with a case of the wobblies and the possible messy culmination of parking the tiger, calling Ralph—call it what you will—is not a dignified state of affairs for a lady.

In conjunction with this lecture’s academic character, I should like to draw attention to our scholarly conclave’s origin—the symposium. Plato gave us the symposium’s classical prototype. The Greek symposium was a booze-up. The word is derived from sympotein, meaning “to drink together.” There you have it: Western civilization was born in the haze of a drunken Greek debauch.

This, by the way, is quite an improvement over Greek culture’s origins in the Pelasgians’ unspeakable goat-and-satyr orgies.

The relationship between culture and drink was nicely and succinctly put by William Faulkner: “Civilization begins with distillation.”

Now, I should like to deal with a couple of comments on Part I of this treatise. One reader asks if he might have come across me in Harare. I assume this is in reference to the African big-game hunter’s favorite tipple, the pink gin.

That we might have met in Rhodesia is possible. Before the troubles, I met a farmer there whose quarter-mile driveway had drainage ditches on both sides filled with empty Angostura bottles. When you consider that a man drinking daily would have difficulty putting away a bottle a month, that’s a lot of pink gins.

After embargos were introduced, the Rhodesians made their own “Angus Stewart” bitters. The Ugandans, ranked as the world’s leading per-capita alcohol consumers, make a gin from bananas called waragi. So the Dark Continent has contributed its own ethereal stars to the spacious alcoholic firmament on high.

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Another reader wonders why I don’t talk about Scotch whisky, single-malts, etc. Because the brown liquid gives me a headache, I never touch the stuff. Chemists will tell you it’s “congeners” that give whisky its tincture. I’ll tell you what they give me: a squad of little jackhammer operators behind my forehead.

Back to my lecture. I’ll leave wines aside for the moment. A discussion of clarets, burgundies, and the inevitable introduction of wines from California, Long Island, South America, the Antipodes, and other places back of beyond is a minefield, with sniping wine bores behind every vine, nattering away about their hints of fruity this and that. It’s a subject better left for another time, if ever.

Let’s mop things up with some notes on after-dinner drinks of class. I’ve got no problem with port, but like wines, it’s a question of the vintner, year, and other variables that can disappoint. Forget Cognac; in France it’s a drink they give to Germans and other peasants. Your Froggy connoisseur drinks Armagnac.

Grappa is an Italian firewater that tastes like lighter fluid. First they make wine, then distill it into Cinzano. A further distillation produces STP, the valve-treatment additive. Finally there’s some horrible dribble left in the distillation column; out of that they make Grappa. Always order the cheapest in the house. It’s total piss, anyway.

Now to the apotheosis of after-lunch or after-dinner drinks—the kümmel. Found only in the poshest of clubs, golf ones especially, it is a clear alcohol flavored by caraway seed, cumin, and fennel. A couple of distillers, one in Hamburg, the other in Berlin, produce the genuine article. Best served in a tiny stem glass with a full circle of lemon rind over crushed ice, kümmel is the true nectar of the gods. It would have made Keats spit out his blushful Hippocrene. I’m not going to tell you who makes it or where you can get it, or even how it’s pronounced. It’s in very short supply.

I ended Part I with a drinker’s ditty. Why change a good thing? Here’s one from Benjamin Hapgood Burt:

One evening in October, when I was one-third sober,
  An’ taking home a “load” with manly pride;
  My feet began to stutter, so I lay down in the gutter,
  And a pig came over an’ lay down by my side;
  Then we sang, “It’s all fair weather when good fellows get together,”
  Till a lady passing by was heard to say:
  “You can tell a man who ‘boozes’ by the company he chooses”
  And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

Yes, I’m a recovering alcoholic and haven’t touched a drop in some time, but whom would you choose to give advice on boozing—a water-drinker?

Let me deal with that class of sportsman for a starter. Who was history’s most notorious teetotaler? Adolf Hitler, that’s who. I believe he may have been a vegetarian to boot.

And who was the 20th century’s biggest boozer? None other than Winston Churchill, history’s greatest Englishman, without whom most of Europe (and I include the British Isles) would be speaking Kraut.

Professor Paul Fussell quotes Churchill’s private secretary:

At home or on travel, at work or on holiday, Churchill drinks a glass of dry sherry at mid-morning and a small bottle of claret or burgundy at lunch. To Mr. Churchill a meal without wine is not a meal at all. When he is in England he sometimes takes port after lunch, and always after dinner. It is at this time that his conversation is most brilliant. In the late afternoon he calls for his first whisky and soda of the day….He likes a bottle of champagne at dinner. After the ritual of port, he sips the very finest Napoleon brandy. He may have a highball in the course of the evening.
—Fussell, Wartime, p. 98

Now, with whom would you prefer to have had dinner? Not only was Hitler a flat-out water-wagoneer, Trevor-Roper in his Hitler’s Table Talk reveals him to have been one of the most boring, balls-aching, conversational blowhards of all time.

I’m not surprised.

May we get down to the business at hand, class? Real men drink martinis. Straight up. If you want to be like James Bond, you can order one that’s half gin, half vodka. It’s not bad, but the proper cocktail is gin, perhaps with a soupçon of French vermouth, shaken, not stirred. The best gin is Plymouth’s, the Royal Navy’s official botanical. The Admiralty know what they’re doing. British sailors are entitled to a daily ration of rum, and the ward room is well stocked. On American warships, drink is officially against regulation.

Here’s the correct response to the offer of a twist of lemon or orange or an olive: “Thank you, but if I wanted a fruit punch, I would have ordered one.”

A note on the glass. If you’re a real professional, yours should not be one of those things that looks like a funnel and is depicted on a million American neon cocktail-lounge signs. It should be a small, say two-ounce, glass on a stem about half the size of a claret glass. Advanced drinkers go for a “pony,” half a size smaller again, which holds something more than an ounce. This is so you can have three or four martinis without getting pissed as a polecat.

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When out in the African bush, we big-game hunters like to gather around the fire at the end of the day for a “sundowner.” The traditional tipple is a “pink gin”—gin and water with a dash of Angostura bitters, no ice. The proper vessel is a “Kelly” glass. It has nothing to do with the actress (later princess) who was such a stunner in Mogambo and gave her name to the handbag. I don’t know who this Kelly was, but his glass is a straight-sided tumbler that is three inches in diameter, about that of a 30mm cannon-shell casing, and four inches tall. They don’t seem to be made anymore, and the dwindling supply survives with care in a few swell men’s clubs. I’ve found them in second- or third-rate motels in the medicine cabinet. If you see one, steal it.

Let’s have a look at another exotic: the bullshot. This cocktail is a clear class indicator. If you order one and the bartender looks at you quizzically, you’re in the wrong joint. A proper bullshot, and it’s taken before lunch only, is made of Campbell’s double-strength beef broth, the juice of one half a lime, a liberal dosage of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, and a shot of vodka, shaken over ice, served straight-up in a Kelly glass. No garnish. It has to be beef broth and only Campbell’s. Consommé won’t work because it jellifies.

Only one New York club makes the pukka version, but I’m not going to tell you which one. Believe it or not, you used to be able to get one at Mark’s Club in London and at the Travellers in Paris. Mark Birley shipped the Campbell’s from America, and the Travellers secured theirs from a U.S. Army PX before the Frogs dismissed our troops.

A word on the Bloody Mary. This is a barely OK drink much favored by pseudo-sophisticates and suburbanites, often adulterated by celery salt, horseradish, Tabasco, celery-stalk garnishes, and for all I know, little umbrellas. If you insist on doctoring up a bullshot’s fecal color, add some V8 juice. It’s known as a Bloody Bull.

To arrive at where we started—with the martini—(and to know the place for the first time) I call on Dorothy Parker, she of the Vicious Circle and quite the literary piss-artist. There is a ditty attributed to her:

One Martini I am able,
Two at the very most.
Three, I’m under the table,
Four, I’m under my host.

She should have ordered a pony.

One of the unintended consequences and, for me, an unanticipated pleasure of the Fox/Cablevision dispute and blackout has been once again listening to baseball on the radio rather than watching it on TV.

Nothing, of course, beats actually going to a game. The field of vision is the thing. I had the pleasure of having been invited to Fenway for the first time this summer. I went to Wrigley Field some years ago. I think these are my favorites.

By the way, here’s one for you, despite the blue-collar reputation of our fellow enthusiasts and the dreadful Wilpons, we New York aristos are Met fans. This is in loving memory of Mrs. Payson, Jock Whitney’s sister and one of us.

A friend took me to the new Yankee Stadium this summer, and the “amenities” are surprising. We had dinner in the Audi restaurant, where sushi and filet of beef were on order served by waiters on tablecloths. Pretty elegant stuff. Mind you, the clientele, the fans, were in shorts and Jeter or A-Rod jerseys, invariably with sneakers. There is no way you could confuse this crowd with the swells at la Grenouille, but I’m not complaining.

What I am complaining about is a feature of baseball you only see on television. You don’t notice it when you’re at the ballpark in person, and you certainly don’t hear it described on the radio, but the television directors persist in giving you close-up after close-up from the wizened manager to the beardless rookie by way of the superstars, of the participants’ revolting personal habits. What do they have in common? They’re orally fixated; they’re all chewing something like a herd of moronic Holsteins, with the inevitable and disgusting consequence—spitting.

Some chew gum and make bubbles. I guess this is OK, but others go for some kind of sunflower seeds that produce a regular snowfall. This seems to be a manager’s specialty. I have a sneaking suspicion that some players actually hold to that ancient vice, the tuck between cheek and gum of chewing tobacco, and the concomitant stream of noxious brown liquor that accompanies this rebarbative habit.

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Our midget mayor likes to bang on until the cows come home about the poisons and dangers of one whiff of secondary tobacco smoke. Well, how about the gastric emissions in the dugouts of Yankee Stadium and Citi Field? When you’re at the ballpark you can’t see into the dugout’s Stygian darkness. But leave it to the TV camera to poke its nose into this Augean stable of hocked-up spittle. It’s a highly unsanitary state of affairs, Mr. Mayor, and you should do something about it. After all, there are Gestapo-like notices in New York’s underground railway threatening severe fines for spitting. What makes these millionaire ballplayers think they can get away with it at the park?

To speak of those dugouts, the TV occasionally gives you a view of the floor, and it’s enough to spoil your appetite. Who do you suppose gets the job of cleaning up the detritus? The same fellows who rake the infield during the stretch, poncing about, singing “YMCA”? I can tell you I’d rather be a Times Square wank-booth jizz-mopper than have to clean the Met dugout. I suppose it’s like a Dublin bar. The cleaners come in with fire hoses and flush the whole stinking place down.

How’s your stomach so far, ladies? Just one final note. What I find particularly disturbing is that the spitting carries on with unabated enthusiasm in indoor stadiums—like the Tampa Bay stately pleasure dome. Hey, fellas—you’re indoors! You’re parking that loogie on the carpet! C’mon, A-Rod, I’ll bet Cameron Diaz didn’t go for that at home.

You know, perhaps the intervention of women, subspecies “lady,” may have a positive influence on this revolting behavior. I’ve noticed that the networks now have women giving commentary, providing analysis, and doing interviews. For my money it’s a blatant, politically correct bid for diversity. But there could be a silver lining. Just once, I’d like Susan Waldman to ask one of the Yankees—“Don’t any of you fellows ever carry a handkerchief?”

You know what gets me hot under my Brooks Brothers collar? It’s the goofballs who go off the rails into fantasy-land when it comes to formal wear.

What do you suppose it means when the invitation calls for “black tie”? There you go, Mr. Mensa—you’re supposed to wear a black jacket and trousers, a white shirt, and a black bow tie. Silk facing on the jacket, a stripe of similar ilk down the trou, a piqué shirt with French cuffs, and some patent-leather shoes properly complete the outfit.

Black tie does not mean some cockamamie, off-the-wall, colored cravat with matching cummerbund that make the wearer look like a carnival freak-show barker.

A fine point: Ironically, the best tailors, Anderson & Sheppard, make their formal outfit in the darkest midnight-blue material. Mr. Halsey, their now-retired boss man, told me that blue is more flattering under artificial light than jet-black. The key is that the blue is so dark that the fellow in black doesn’t know why he looks not as nice.

Beau Brummell, the magnificent Regency fop, invented black and white as a gentleman’s evening uniform. He wore a tailcoat. It remained for the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) to invent the tailless dinner jacket. This style was brought to America by one of my ancestors’ pals, a member of the Tuxedo Club, Tuxedo Park, New York. Hence the common appellation by which the dinner suit is known among hoi polloi. However, you might as well have a sign on your back saying “rube” to call the dinner suit a “tuxedo.”

The point to remember is that the outfit is a uniform. Formal dress does not present the male with an opportunity to stand out in any garish fashion. You are meant to be a somber foil to the ladies in their spectacular gowns and jewels.

I’ll deal quickly with a couple exceptions. In Palm Beach it’s OK, in fact it’s de rigueur, for the smart Coconuts at their New Year’s Eve Ball to wear a white dinner jacket. For formal all-male dinners, a velvet smoking jacket, perhaps even with frogging and quilted lapels, is not out of the question if the occasion is frivolous enough and you know everyone. Let’s put it this way: If it’s a stag dinner for one of your mates at a club, fine. But if it’s, say, a remembrance dinner for a fallen brother officer–ixnay on the foppery.

Here’s a tip on the shirt: Marcella or piqué are the smartest, and I’ve seen ones with a fly front and no studs. First of all, it can have many buttons (that don’t show) so the shirt doesn’t gap open to reveal any fish-belly skin. Secondly, it obviates the need to mess with studs, invariably looking for a missing one. Unless you’re some kind of Oriental potentate, the gentleman’s general rule is: The less jewelry, the better.

There you are, Mr. Social Alpiniste, Mr. Tenzing Norgay of the Social Himalayas: I’ve given you a crash course in how to look like Mr. Wellborn.

Here’s the thing: Fashion, change, flashiness, or eccentricity are out of place in men’s formal wear. If you can stand watching the Oscars, you’ll see every imaginable variety of clown outfit on the men. There was a time when actors such as Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart dressed like gentlemen (check out Slim Aaron’s photo of them). No longer. Except for Jack Nicholson, your celluloid male players dress like ponces in a Tangiers male brothel.

Even the president has been sucked into the solecism of wearing a four-in-hand necktie rather than the bow. It’s not on, Sir. Nor is the shirt with an attached wing collar, which is impossible to have cleaned by a modern laundry.

Here’s how to deal with the guy in the rope-lapelled, flecked dinner jacket and the matching silver tie, cummerbund, and hankie set. Sidle up and ask in the sincerest way: “Will you be favoring us with a few songs tonight?”

For about an hour I watched the Columbus Day Parade from the rise of Lenox Hill at 71st Street, just north of the Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue’s shady side.

The first element was a United States Marine Band. It wasn’t the “President’s Own,” who were probably busy in Washington. The unit’s name on its big bass drum was the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing Band. They were about fifty strong, with a drum major out front and an officer on the right flank.

It makes a feller proud to be an American to see these lean Marines, including a few females, in their blue jackets, all in perfect step, their starched white trousers breaking at the exact same moment, the ranks and files as perfectly aligned as if they were die-cast metal toy soldiers. They were playing a song by that greatest Marine Band director: John Philip Sousa’s “Washington Post.” It may be the best thing ever to come from that broadsheet some call “Pravda on the Potomac.”

The Marines were followed by the Tokyo Police Band, all in white from headgear to boot led by a high muckety-muck officer with enough scrambled eggs on his saucer cap to make a nice-sized omelet. They were not as good as the Marines but were in step and pretty sharp. I thought how ironic it was that these visitors from the Land of the Rising Sun, those folks who gave us Pearl Harbor, Peleliu, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima were in such close proximity to our Marines.

Following them came the NYPD. I don’t know whether it was THE police band, but they were a Raggedy Andy group of out-of-step, overweight dirtbags, certainly as compared to the Marines or even our Oriental visitors. I don’t want to be run out of town on a rail as almost happened to Taki a few years ago when he wrote something critical about the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Mayor Giuliani threatened to deport him, unaware that Taki is a US citizen. But the police band was nazzo good. Perhaps the strac cops are otherwise engaged in protecting us from terrorists and narcotraficantes and don’t have time for this parade foolishness. Perhaps budgets are squeezed. Perhaps they were an NYPD Italian-American brotherhood band that only does this once a year. As Voltaire said, “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.”

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Come to think of it, where was that most important of all Italian-American fraternities, the Mafia? I would like to have seen a contingent from the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club—dapper Dons in patent shoes and snappy custom suits with subtle bulges concealing the hardware. A flipped-brim cream fedora would be too much to ask, I suppose.

The parade was all downhill from there. Yes, there was a ceremonial unit representing the “Garibaldi Guard,” the 39th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment who fought in the Civil War. There were some dudes in civvies with those raven-feathered Pinocchio hats that distinguish the Alpini mountain infantry, one of the world’s outstanding elite combat units. But it looked like the veterans had packed away plenty of pasta since demobilization, perhaps right before the parade, as they meandered up the Avenue. Better the Italians send over an active regiment next year.

But the first and the best were our Marines. A Marine officer always refers to “my Marines.” Marines are not tough; they’re “hard,” which is tougher than tough. Marines are taught to be always courteous but never friendly. Of course, you have your blood-and-guts stereotypes such as Generals Chesty Puller and Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, but then there are the sensitive, eccentric gentlemen such as General Smedley “Old Gimlet Eye” Butler (a pacifist who was twice awarded the Medal of Honor) and the serene musician John Philip Sousa.

When the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing Band reached the parade route’s end at 72nd Street, they didn’t just fall out in a mob. To sharp commands they did some column and oblique maneuvers in crack military fashion. Our Marines—never better!

Guinness heiress Ivana Lowell has released her memoir, Why Not Say What Happened? I’ll tell you why: It’s a bore. A rich and privileged kid’s twisted family history. The story of a dysfunctional childhood. We’ve heard it a thousand times. Frankly, who gives a shit?

Here it is in a gilded nutshell: Ivana is a descendant of the 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a Governor General of Canada and Viceroy of India. She’s the granddaughter of Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, the Guinness heiress. Her mother was the alcoholic Lady Caroline Blackwood, who married Sigmund Freud’s grandson Lucian (the painter), then composer Israel Citkowitz (Ivana’s putative father), and finally Robert Lowell, the alcoholic and manically depressed poet (her stepfather).

Ivana was sexually abused as a child and later had a pubic-hair transplant. Her sister overdosed on heroin. She had an affair with the rebarbative Bob Weinstein (the “good-looking” Weinstein brother). At 32 she discovered that her real father was Giant screenwriter Ivan Moffat, her mother’s occasional lover, who was not a particularly nice man, it is written. Have I said Ivana also went to rehab?

I don’t get it. She’s a low-life Guinness, an aristocratic Lindsay Lohan without the possibly interesting interlude of jail time. A Brit Paris Hilton, of note only because of her pedigree. She has done nothing, it would appear, to warrant any reader’s attention. Her book is an upper-class Mommie Dearest for those with a Debrett’s Peerage close at hand.

We’re only eight pages into it when we read, “My great-grandfather the honorable Arthur Edward Guinness was by all accounts an unattractive character. I have heard many stories that illustrate his extravagant and boorish behavior.”

You know, I’m tired of books in which the silver-spoon descendants of rich and distinguished families trash their ancestors. It’s called “lese-majesty,” an outrage upon the dignity of dead relatives unable to defend themselves. The primitive, naked Bakota Negroes of Eastern Gabon had more respect for their ancestors.

I’ll bet you I can find out something nice about the Honorable Arthur Edward Guinness faster than you can find a bedbug in Spanish Harlem. Too late—I had a peek at Wikipedia, and it turns out he was a noted philanthropist who gave St. Stephen’s Green to the people of Dublin. Chalk one up for the ancestors.

We WASPS have a long tradition with the London “Season.” The Chelsea Flower Show, Royal Ascot, Wimbledon, Henley, Glorious Goodwood in mid-summer, it’s very old hat to us. It began during Victorian times, when rich in land but poor in cash Anglo aristos came over to our shores across the pond and landed our daughters. Eastern seaboard American money built plenty of English stately home roofs, and we got some funny looking people with handles in their names to call cousin.

When I was younger, I remember my parents, Popsy and Topsy Mortimer never missing a London season. More often than not they stayed at Blenheim Palace, with the then Duke of Marlborough, Bert. He was an awful bully and all that, but he was very friendly with my parents. They reciprocated by having the old goat stay with them in Palm Beach for months on end, especially during those post war years when England had no central heating and the coalminers strike had frozen the tight little island solid.

Needless to say, things ain’t what they used to be. Too many Americans, n.o.c.d’s actually, (not our class, dear) have discovered the joys of the season and are -  as I write -  overweight, overfunded, and over here. Last week I told you about Ascot, and how the gratin has been removed. At Wimbledon this week, while having my tea and strawberries, I found myself in a sea of sweaty, loudly dressed Americans, none of whom I recognized. No one like Bill Clothier, of the old Philadelphia Clothiers, none of the Woods of Long Island, not even another Mortimer. Names like Schwartzman, Richard Wiseman, a friend of John McEnroe’s, and others new to mention, if you know what I mean.

Mind you, change is inevitable, and London itself is not the London I knew as a child. Great hostesses like Lady Hartwell no longer entertain. We now have one Rena Sindi, an Iraqi woman of a dark hue that tries to lure celebrities to various parties but they’re much too horrible to even entertain attending them. Instead, I headed down to Devon, where the Hanburys had their annual cricket party and weekend. One of the Hanbury girls is married to David RockSavage, Marquis of Chomondelay, pronounced Chumly for you not in the know, the other, Marina, is engaged to be married to Ned Lambton, Earl of Lambton, so you get the picture. People like Tom Parker Bowles, Ben Eliot, son and nephew of Camila, the Marquis of Worcester, Bunter to us insiders, and the spiritual head of Takimag, Taki himself, were some of the 80 odd weekend guests.

A word of caution. I like and admire Taki a lot, but he’s much too old to be playing cricket with 25-year-olds, and, worse, far too old to be chasing 20 year old girls around the grand house all evening – as he was seen to do. Still, it was the loveliest of weekend house parties, and now I’m back in London for the second week of Wimbledon and the grand party of Lord and Lady Derby.