TOUGH GUYS DON’T EAT SANDWICHES. OR DO THEY?

I was doing one of my periodic rereads of Raymond Chandler, and inevitably new things leap out at you every time.  (Of course the sexual weirdness just seems weirder and weirder.)

This is the only picture I've ever seen of Chandler with a drink in his hand:

I’m well familiar with the martinis, the gimlets, the (surprising) Yorkshire pudding, but this time I was struck by the sandwiches.

 

In the High Window Marlowe says to some poor counter hand, ‘’Give me a cup of coffee, weak, and a very thin ham sandwich on stale bread.  No, I better not eat yet either.  Good-by.’

 

Earlier the book he goes to the Tigertail Lounge, orders ‘a martini and a sandwich’ and sits in ‘a shallow booth.’  What kind of sandwich goes best with a martini? 

 

And then, The Long Goodbye he goes into overdrive

‘I went to the drugstore and ate a chicken salad sandwich and drank some coffee. The coffee was over-strained and the sandwich was as full of rich flavor as a piece torn off an old shirt.  Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out at the sides, preferably a little wilted.’

 

This seems extremely harsh on Americans and the American sandwich, and also (if you ask me) inaccurate. 

 

Many of us have done a lot of pondering about which actor would be the perfect Marlowe.  Bogart’s OK by me, but I still think Mitchum is the MAN.

 

I can’t imagine Bogart’s Marlowe sitting down to a sandwich, much less making one.

 

But here’s Mitchum in the Michael Winner version of The Big Sleep, doing some sandwich construction.  Hard to tell if tooth picks are involved, but he is in England. I'm guessing not.

 

LIBATIONS WITH BOB

When I first came to Los Angeles I thought I might spend a certain amount of time at the Formosa Café.  It was the hangout of many classic movie stars, but for some reason I only ever associated it with Robert Mitchum.  Who wouldn’t want to drink in a watering hole where Mitchum once drank?

Well, as is the way of these things I went to the Formosa just once, and it was perfectly fine and I’ve never been back since.  The ghost of Mitchum didn’t seem much in evidence.

Anyway I found myself reading Clive James’s memoir North Face of Soho.  Back when he was a celebrity interviewer on British TV, James interviewed Mitchum.  They had a preliminary meeting at the Dorchester but it didn’t start out so well, largely because Mitchum was speaking in a low, utterly incomprehensible  growl.

James writes, “Theoretically Mitchum was on the wagon at the time, but … when the waiter asked him if he would like something to drink he made the waiter bend down and spent a long time whispering in his ear.  The whispering was accompanied by illustrative movements of his hands, as if he were passing on arcane secrets in the art of flower arrangement.  When the drink arrived it was two feet tall, changed color on the way up, and had foliage sprouting from the top, like a core sample from an Amazonian swamp … There was always the chance that this concoction had alcohol in it, but it certainly had some kind of active ingredient, because after he’d inhaled about half of it, Mitchum’s voice suddenly came into focus.”

I had never imagined Mitchum as the kind of man who'd like drinks that were two feet tall, changed color on the way up, and had foliage sprouting from the top, but I know he was a man for all occasions.

It’s been harder than I expected to find photographs of Mitchum in full party mode, but I do like this one of Mitchum with his boys, Christopher and James.  It looks like a set up to me, a photo op,  but I like it nevertheless, a man who makes (or poses in the process of making) a roast for his kids – what’s not to love?