DRUNK FOR PLEASURE AND PROFIT

I was thinking about Buster Keaton, as I often do, and I came across this ad of the great stone face shilling for Country Club Malt Liquor:

Now, even people who know very little about Buster Keaton are likely to know that he had a problem with alcohol.  I never think problems with alcohol need much “explaining,” but it seems especially understandable in Keaton’s case.  The poor guy ruined himself doing stunts.  He fractured his neck while filming Sherlock Junior, and only found out about it years later.  I imagine he must have been in serious physical pain most of the time, and needed all the anesthesia he could get.  Who’d deny him a few malt liquors?

And of course (op cit on this blog) Errol Flynn appeared in ads for “ready to serve” Heublein cocktails. (Hey, you know I love you Errol, but are you really sure about that hat?).

One problem you might imagine with serious drunks is that they’re not usually great advertisements for alcohol.  For that matter, beyond a certain stage they don’t much care what they drink.

Certainly the young Dylan Thomas was quite a good-looking young man.  The older version less so, and since he died when he was just 39, worse was surely ahead.  

Even so, this hasn’t stopped his face appearing on the bottles of Penderyn whisky, though his face actually looks better on the box than on the glass.

And shrewd Dylan Thomas watchers will be aware that the image on the box is actually cropped from a larger photograph which shows him with his wife Caitlin, who I’m sure would be disappointed not to have made it onto the packaging.

Now that I think about it of course I remember that Hunter S. Thompson was invoked by Flying Dog in a series of “tribute beers” though admittedly the Ralph Steadman beer labels may have be a great part of the attraction.  Speaking as someone who was once in the same room as drunk and raging Thompson  (a semi-public event and the room was large enough but it soon seemed far too small to contain the drunken rage of Mr. T) I’m not sure I’d necessarily want whatever he’s having.

One famous drunk writer it’s hard to imagine as a poster boy for any alcoholic beverage is Malcolm Lowry, (a one-time temporary Angelino – lived in the Hotel Normandie for a while, drank in the Brown Derby), author of Under the Volcano. 

According to Martin Amis reviewing Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry by Gordon Bowker,  “To make a real success of being an alcoholic, to go all the way with it, you need to be other things too: shifty, unfastidious, solipsistic, insecure and indefatigable. Lowry was additionally equipped with an extra-small penis, which really seemed to help.”

If your autobiographical self is going to be portrayed on screen as a desperate drunk, it might as well be by Albert Finney.

So Lowry was not exactly an advertiser’s dream, although I suspect he could have written some lively advertising copy:  this from Under the Volcano  “Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!”   Don Draper would probably have cut that “gibbous.”

PINTERESQUE – WE STILL GOT IT.

 Some fellow writers tell me they love to sit in restaurants or bars, listening to people talk.  They write down the dialogue they overhear, and then they incorporate it into short stories or novels.  Sounds like a good plan but it never works for me.  In general I think “real” dialogue never sounds all that real by the time it’s got to the page.  However …

I was in San Francisco over the weekend, and having dinner in pretty good French restaurant, Café de La Presse (snails, charcuterie, cassoulet, that kind of thing), and there was a man on the next table ordering a drink from the waiter.  The guy looked a bit like Adam Savage of Mythbusters, but more groomed. 

The dialogue went like this.

ADAM SAVAGE LOOKALIKE: I’d like a Perfect Manhattan.

WAITER: A Perfect Manhattan.

ADAM SAVAGE LOOKALIKE: Shaken violently.

WAITER:  Shaken violently?

ADAM SAVAGE LOOKALIKE: Yes.  (Pause) Violently.

You couldn’t make this stuff up, unless you were Harold Pinter.

The other good thing that I did in San Francisco was visit the Beat Museum where I picked up a couple of items I knew I should have bought on my last visit; a pair of sponge beer cozies (sometimes spelled koozies), the things you wrap around your beer can to keep your beer cold and/or your hand warm.  As you see, one is emblazoned with the face of Charles Bukowski, the other with Hunter S. Thompson.

Frankly I can’t see Chas using one of these things to hold his beer.  He wasn’t the kind of guy whose beer stuck around long enough to get warm, and he surely didn’t care about getting his hand a little wet. Thompson seems more likely.  A man who uses a cigarette holder might also use a beer cozy, though I can’t find any photographic evidence for this.

I suspect that, at a pinch, you could even use one of these cozies to sheath your cocktail shaker, as you shake your Perfect Manhattan, yes, violently.