THE SANDWICH OBSESSION CONTINUES

In From A to B and Back Again, Andy Warhol writes (or anyway dictates) the story of a character named Taxi – a very thinly disguised portrait of Edie Sedgwick, and he reveals that (amazingly) she was a sandwich fan of a very specific kind.

Warhol writes, ‘Taxi would spend most of the day at lunch uptown at Reuben's ordering their Celebrity Sandwiches—the Anna Maria Alberghetti, the Arthur Godfrey, the Morton Downey were her favorites—and she would keep running into the ladies room and sticking her finger down her throat and throwing each one up. She was obsessed with not getting fat. She'd eat and eat on a spree and then throw up and throw up, and then take four downers and pop off for four days at a time.’

The establishment referred to here is Reuben’s Restaurant on Manhattan’s 58th Street, between Fifth and Madison. It ran from 1928 to 1965, though it had an ‘official’ opening in 1935. There were other locations too. The owner was Alfred Reuben, one of the few Reuben’s who didn’t claim to have invented the sandwich of the same name. And he didn’t invent the notion of naming sandwiches after celebrities either, but he did make it his own. In truth I’d never heard of Anna Maria Alberghetti, Arthur Godfrey, or Morton Downey. (I had heard of Morton Downey Junior, but he was appalling). Here are the celebs in question.

Incidentally all of them outlived Edie Sedgwick, and if the Internet is to be believed, Anna Maria Alberghetti is still with us. As far as that goes, even Alfred Reuben outlived Edie. I’m sure she was far too cool ever to be photographed with a sandwich, though being photographed with a cigarette and a drink was apparently perfectly OK.