“Very good, sir. Should he call I shall certainly tell him that. Where shall you be this time, sir?”
“The YMCA, I think, Simmons.”
“Very good, sir,” he said.
I have always enjoyed my conversations with butlers, and Simmons is one of my favorites. “Yes,” I said philosophically, “the International Youth Hostel is filled up this trip, Simmons. There’s a convention of Children for Peace in town to picket the UN.”
“Ah,” Simmons said.
“And Travelers Aid is just a little weary of my tricks by now.”
“Ah.”
“Well, Simmons, give the master my message. I shall probably be seeing you. You’re looking very well, incidentally.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Thank you, Simmons. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, sir.”
He closed the door quietly behind me and I walked happily back up the frenchy cobblestoned street to the Fifth Avenue bus.
It is interesting how I got to know Nate. It was two years ago. New York is the hardest place in the world for an outsider. I had made about half a dozen trips there and was no closer to the prizes the town has to offer (“offer” is hardly the world) than I had ever been. I could see celebrities, of course, almost at will, but I could not get close to them. What was the difference between me and the teen-age autograph hounds that stalked them on the sidewalks outside their hotels? The techniques which worked in other cities were useless in New York. The great were so often there only for short intervals. Without a formal structure, without a community where the great moved always in habitual patterns, I was helpless. (It is common knowledge, for instance, that Hemingway drinks on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons at the Floridita Bar in Havana and that Faulkner buys his tobacco at Pettigrew’s Drugs in Oxford, but how many people know that Igor Stravinski borrows books religiously on the first Monday of every month from the Los Angeles County Public Library, Branch #3, or that the Oppenheimers dress for dinner every night and that Robert himself brings in the cleaning to Princeton Same Day Cleaners on Wednesday morning?) My blue suit — which I had bought when I quit wrestling — hung unused in my closet.
When I had exhausted all the techniques I could think of (at one time I was so desperate that I palmed myself off as a singer and waited six and a half hours in a cold theater to audition twenty seconds for a part before Rodgers and Hammerstein), I had my inspiration. The problem, of course, and somehow I had lost sight of it, was not to meet any particular great man — that could always be done — but to make a reliable contact. I had always been an avid reader of all the columns. It was in this way that I was able to keep track of the hundreds of celebrities who were constantly coming in and out of New York. It wasn’t long before I became familiar with the name of Nate Lace, through the doors of whose restaurant celebrities of all sorts spilled in a redundancy of fame, like fruit from a cornucopia. With a contact like him, I thought—With a contact like him—And that was it. It was at once so simple and so profound that I could not concentrate on the details, or wait to put it to the test. My original intention had been to wait until evening, but I was so full of my plan that at two in the afternoon I could sit still no longer. I put on my blue suit and went down to Nate Lace’s restaurant. I had no reservation, of course (Nate’s policy is to give no strangers reservations over the telephone; somehow I had divined this), and I tried to give ten dollars to Perry, who at that time I did not know. He looked me over, laughed coldly, and handed the money back. (I thought I had done something gauche. It wasn’t until months later that I discovered I simply had not offered him enough.) “That is not nessaire,” Perry said. “As it happens there is a table.”
I ordered ninety dollars’ worth of Nate’s most expensive food. (Nate says that his restaurant is the most expensive in the world.) I was so nervous when it came that I had difficulty eating it. (Actually, I do not really like good food, though Nate would be offended to learn this.) When I had finished I called the waiter. “You needn’t bother with the bill,” I said. “I can’t pay for any of this.”
The waiter went off to consult with Perry, and I cursed myself for not waiting until the evening, when Nate would certainly have been in. My only hope now was that it was too big a case for Perry and that it would have to be called to Nate’s attention. I needn’t have concerned myself; I should have known my man better from the columns. This was the sort of thing a man like Nate would take great satisfaction in handling personally. Perry leaned across the table familiarly and said with a nice sense of menace that Nate wasn’t in the restaurant and would have to be called. Even better, I thought, by making his rage keener this works into my hands.
When Nate came in he barely nodded at Cary Grant, sitting in a booth near the window, and went directly over to Perry. He had on a heavy, fur-collared overcoat and his nose was red and dripping.
“I couldn’t get a cab and had to walk from Fifty- fifth,” I heard him tell Perry. “Where’s the mooch?”
Perry pointed to my table, where I had been allowed to sit until Nate came. He walked over.
“You the one don’t like my food?”
“It was delicious,” I said.
“I see you didn’t touch the Balinese wonder pudding,” he said, pointing to an enormous, Victorian confection with flying buttresses of a caramelly, fruit-streaked cream which lay untasted on an ornate doily on a snow- white plate on a scalloped, thick damask napkin on a rich silver salver.
“It was a little much after the smoked whale in ambergris sauce,” I said.
“Was it?”
“A little much,” I said. Cary Grant was looking at us.
“It stays on the bill.”
I couldn’t imagine why he made an issue of it since I couldn’t pay for any of it.
“Nate,” I said. “I’m not an actor.”
“What the hell do I care you’re not an actor?”
“I mean to say I’m not using this incident to get a part in a picture or to obtain publicity for myself.”
“Who gives a shit?”
“I know you have allowed certain of your favorite comics to run up tabs of ten thousand dollars and more.”
“You ain’t one of my favorite comics, buddy. What you’re going to run up is a tab of thirty days or more.”
“Where is your vaunted sense of humor, Nate?”
“Where’s yours?” he said. “You couldn’t order bear steak? You couldn’t order tiger filet? Ambergris sauce! Do you know what ambergris sauce costs me? It would be cheaper to pour the most expensive Paris perfume over the god-damned whale.”
“I’m sorry, Nate,” I said. “Look, must Perry hear all this?”
“Perry’s a trusted employee,” Nate said. “Beat it, Perry.”
I told Nate my story. At first he listened doubtfully, but then, as I told him of my past, of my desperate need for a contact in New York, he began to warm up. Soon he was picking at the Balinese wonder pudding with his fingers and I felt I had him. He seemed to find it very amusing. The more I talked the more he laughed. “Hey,” he said when I had finished, “you’re a character, ain’t you?” He said it as though he had discovered something deep and abiding and true about the human personality.
“I guess I am,” I said humbly.
“Yeah,” he said, “yeah. A character.”
“That’s about the size of it.” I said.
“Yeah,” Nate said. “Hey, you want me to show you around the place? You want to see my kitchen?”
He took me with him through the restaurant. I even looked with him into the women’s powder room when Estelle, the attendant, said it was all clear. In the kitchen (which was not very large and none too clean) we sat at a butcher’s block drinking arctic lichen tea and laughed together over Nate’s story of his troubles with the government. It seems that Nate’s was a very popular place for important people to bring important clients. Of course they would then deduct the bill from their taxes as a business expense, and the government found itself in the peculiar position of buying three- and four-hundred-dollar dinners for people. They were going to refuse to allow it by declaring Nate’s off limits when Nate flew to Washington and made his offer. He would rebate the government 15 per cent on everything declared a deduction in his place. The government knew itself to be on very shaky legal ground and accepted at once.