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.

SUGAR DOGS

You know, sometimes I almost like my life.  Last week I was in the local Gelson’s supermarket and there, standing in line, was the more than fabulous Mary Woronov.  That’s her above in a Warhol screentest.  This is her below in Chelsea Girls:

In fact I’ve met Mary once or twice but I wasn’t absolutely sure she’d recognize me, but I said hello and she did seem to clock that I wasn’t just some crazed fan bothering her in the supermarket, and I said, “I didn’t know this was your local supermarket,” and she said, “Oh it’s not.  But I walk my dogs up in the park and then afterwards they get to eat roast beef.”  And she brandished a pack of roast beef she’d just bought at the  counter.  This is, more or less, how she looks today.

Now, I happen to know how much roast beef costs at Gelson’s deli counter – basically, if you have to ask you can’t afford it.  And, without thinking I said, “Oh, I’ll be your dog Mary.”  How we laughed. 

And it occurred to me that this kind of thing just possibly might not have happened to me if I didn’t live in Hollywood.  Afterwards I wondered if I should have said, "No sugar cookies, Mary?"  referring to her movie Sugar Cookies - summarized thus on imdv, "A film producer murders his star actress during an erotic 'game' and makes it look like suicide. The dead girl's lesbian lover discovers what happened, and plots her revenge."   (Guess who play's the lesbian lover).  But on balance I'm glad I stuck with offering to be her dog.

NAKED AT THE SCREENING

These are strange, virtual days indeed.  There was a time, not so long ago, when if you wanted to see any of the early Andy Warhol movies you had to go to the ends of the earth, to some dank “art space” or “film co-op” in a bad part of town.  I went eagerly to such places, and of course I admit that the difficulty, the seeking out, was part of the attraction, but I never managed to see Nude Restaurant.  That’s it above and below.

         But now, as I have just discovered, you can go on Youtube and, at the click of a cursor, watch Taylor Mead and Viva in Warhol’s Nude Restaurant, and I have to say I’m rather charmed by the pair of them.   I suppose Viva and Taylor were never exactly going to be Hepburn and Tracy but at least in Nude Restaurant Viva seems to be trying vaguely to stick to the subject.

         She talks about going to a restaurant on a date, “this horrible, horrible expensive rotten ... something like the Delmonico Grill” where she “isn’t aware of the procedures” and she orders clams on the half shell which come with lemon slices wrapped in gauze, and because she’s stoned the lemons look “like a little baby bunting ... like Christ in his swaddling clothes.”  Then she goes off on a tangent about who was the real author of The Story of O.

         Stephen Koch, author of Stargazer, the first book length study of Warhol’s movies, absolutely despises Nude Restaurant, writing, “I cannot think of a single inch of footage ... that is worth looking at.”  The movie was shot at the Mad Hatter restaurant in Manhattan, in October 1967.  Apparently there was another version shot the same day - all nude, all male – and this was only ever shown in a porn theater, to what response, I don't know.

         A quick cruise around the Internet reveals that there are quite a few “nude restaurants” in the world.  The one above is, or was, in New York, but they seem to me everywhere.  I have only ever been to one nude restaurant, at a clothing-optional swinger’s resort in Florida.  It was literary research, OK?  The people there seemed content enough, and in fact after I’d been there about ten minutes I felt pretty much the way I would feel in any in any not so good restaurant anywhere in America.  Which makes me wonder why make a big deal of it?  But chacun a son gout, as they say.

         Personally I think the kitchen is a far more erotic place than a restaurant.  It’s a little more private for one thing, though I know that not everybody demands privacy.  Also, if you insist on cooking naked, it’s more potentially dangerous, with the flames, the boiling water, the spitting fat and so on, and again that may add to the thrill.

        

         Once in a while I see the (ahem) sex educator Nina Hartley (that's her above) in my local supermarket.  I suppose as a true psychogourmet I should have peered into her basket by now, to see exactly what she buys, but maybe that would be a little too creepy.

         However, as you see above, there are some extant images of Ms, Hartley in her own kitchen, making a salad.  Far and away the most fascinating thing in that kitchen is the essoreuse - I’m not sure there’s a good English word for it – it’s the white cylindrical thing on the corner of the counter, a thing that spins round and you use it to dry salad leaves.  Looking at this picture I realized I hadn’t seen an essoreuse for years.  Maybe nobody washes their salad leaves any more.  Or maybe they just don’t dry them.

         But if you’re really looking for cheap, zesty sexual thrills in the kitchen, a salad really doesn’t cut it.  You need a sausage.  Now a sausage is a vaguely lewd and phallic thing in the first place, but if you cook it in the nude you’re guaranteed to get some big, cheap, slapstick laughs.  Only one each, girls!!!

         Incidentally, Warhol also made a movie called Kitchen.  I confess I haven’t seen that one either, neither in a dank art space nor on Youtube, but as far as I tell from the descriptions, it contains neither nudity nor sausages.  Shame.