The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir Read online

  The second hurdle was winning back Polly’s affections. My father provided few details about this phase at the dinner table, though he told me, many years later, that he and Polly had stayed in “a lovely little room in a fifth-rate hotel,” the Hôtel Rue de l’Abbé Grégoire on the Left Bank. “We had a great time,” he said. “We were young and healthy. There was nothing else to do but eat and practice our French and screw. It was a very balanced life.”

  One of the first milestones in this balanced life was lunch at the aforementioned department store. In “Brief History of a Love Affair,” he recalls that it was a brilliant August day, “a day like a pearl.”

  With our lunch my wife, already to me formidably learned in these matters, ordered a cheap white Graves. Its deep straw color was pleasing to the eye. Even in this busy department store it was served with just a graceful allusion to a flourish. It was properly chilled against the midsummer heat. For the first time I tasted wine. It must have sent me into mild catatonia for it was not until perhaps sixty seconds later that I seemed to hear my wife’s voice say from far away, “You have the most peculiar, foolish smile on your face.” “Do I?” was all I could reply.

  He always said this first taste felt less like a new experience than like an old one that had been waiting all his life for him to catch up to it. He tried to describe it by analogy—it was like Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence, or like the moment when the hero of Conrad’s “Youth” reaches the East, or like Napoleon’s realization that he was born to be a soldier—but invariably fell back on the language of eros. The Graves spoke to him: “I am your fate. You are mine. Love me.”

  I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Prohibition hadn’t coincided with my father’s college years. Would he have tried wine at a forgettable party in Morningside Heights instead of in Paris, during one of the happiest moments of his life? In that case, would the connection have felt less compelling? Or what if Polly had ordered a couple of Rémy Martins instead of that bottle of Graves? Might he have fallen in love with cognac? I don’t know the answer, but I know what he would have said: Paris helped, young love helped, the perfection of that August afternoon helped, but he and wine were made for each other. Kismet.

  The Retrieval of Polly had some ancillary sub-tales: the time he ordered fraises des bois and, failing to understand that the accompanying tureen of crème Chantilly was intended for all the establishment’s patrons, ate it all himself; the time he realized he couldn’t afford the restaurant he and Polly had just walked into, and attempted to save their pride and their pocketbooks with a budget-friendly order of melon—but mispronounced it, and was alarmed to see the waiter emerge from the kitchen bearing a platter on which reposed an enormous fish: a merlan. When he told these stories, he wanted us to laugh at what a rube he’d been, but also to understand that each embarrassment, like each of the dozens of bottles of wine on which he was proud to overspend during those six charmed weeks, was a lesson in civilization.

  7

  Homesick

  When I went to Paris the summer before my sixteenth birthday, I was, of course, no wine virgin. What Fadiman over the age of ten could have been? But the watered-down glasses of my childhood didn’t count. I was practically grown up. It was time to have my own Platonic-Conradian-Napoleonic-Fadimanian moment. I was ready to love wine.

  There was plenty of it, from the glass of generic red I was served on Air France (things were different in 1969), to the omnipresent vins de pays on the table of my host family, to the Mascara Noir (can this really have been the name of a wine, or was it a melon/merlan-esque misunderstanding?) that I shared with some boys before an evening at the Comédie-Française, to the bottles lugged by a throng of fellow students on a raucous promenade down the Champs-Élysées on which an earnest young guitarist’s attempts to sing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” were drowned out by shouts of “Pass the Bordeaux!” Opportunity abounded. There were only two problems. The first was that I was miserable. I eventually fell in with a copacetic circle of intellectuals who quoted Sartre and smoked Gauloises (I did the former, so they forgave me for not doing the latter), but at the start I was a homesick, jet-lagged, self-conscious nerd from L.A. on an Eastern prep-school summer program who felt more or less the way her father must have felt when he crossed the river from Brooklyn to Manhattan. In other words, for the first time in my life, I was a meatball.

  The second problem was that, as I put it, “I try to drink wine whenever I can, but I still don’t especially like it.”

  I know that’s what I said because my father saved the nine letters I sent home that summer, all addressed to “The Clifton Fadimans,” as if my mother were an invisible subset. (I found them in his files after he died.) I saved my mother’s three letters—models of solicitude on the importance of sufficient sleep and a good breakfast—and the fifteen I received from my father, addressed to “Mlle. Anne Fadiman.” Between “Dearest Anne” and “All my love, Daddy,” he managed to stuff in so much reassuring advice—disregard the opinions of mediocre people, remember that discomfort is fodder for future writing, take more walks, speak more French, don’t take things so seriously, to hell with marks (“and Engels too”)—that he made me feel not like an outcast among cool preppies but like a Trockenbeerenauslese among vins ordinaires.

  When I was in middle school, I had considered my father an assiduous parent but too smart, too square, too odd, and too old. (He was forty-nine when I was born, sixty when I started seventh grade, sixty-five when I went to France.) My friends’ fathers were very different. They radiated West Coast informality; he preferred not just East Coast decorum but what he called “English good manners,” by which he meant manners that were unostentatious, none too chummy, and, in their ideal form, practiced by someone who could trace his ancestry to the Norman Conquest (not before, since decent wine had arrived with the French) and owned a small Palladian country house in Hertfordshire. My friends’ fathers were tan and sportive; my father’s résumé listed his hobbies as wine and “the avoidance of exercise.” Whenever my school’s annual Father-Daughter Picnic rolled around, I left him at home and tagged along with my cousin, whose father was younger, taller, more likely to acquit himself creditably in a volleyball game, and generally less embarrassing. My father never said a word about being ditched. Only years later, after I became a parent myself, did I realize how much I must have hurt him.

  But I was fifteen now, just beginning to move out of the peak season of anti-parental eye-rolling, and in France I didn’t have to worry what anyone would think of him, since he was more than five thousand miles away. I was surprised how glad I was to hear that he missed me “dreadfully” and watched the mail “like a hawk” in hopes of an aerogramme with a French postmark. I appreciated his promise that he would drink a toast to me on Bastille Day. Even when I was feeling down, I shared his tender feelings for Paris. In fact, I had to admit I had more in common with him than with most of the students on my trip, whose idea of a good time was “going to a discothèque, meeting other people from the group, getting drunk, getting sick.” He dismissed these activities with a single, satisfying word: “vacuous.”

  But there was one vital thing we did not yet have in common. “Keep on trying the wine,” he wrote. “Suddenly it will seem right and habitual.” (How many fathers today would offer that counsel to their fifteen-year-old daughters?) On a side trip to the château country, a glass of Vouvray—which I dutifully described as “a white pétillant demi-sec”—went down with reasonable success (“I’m improving, Daddy”), but that was only because it was cold and I was hot. I would have preferred Coca-Cola.

  When our group traveled through southern France, I wrote my parents: “Trumpets! I fully expect you to faint or do something equally dramatic when I tell you that M. Cosnard took me to La Pyramide day before yesterday.” I then listed everything I had eaten. My father had told me numerous times that La Pyramide, a triple-étoile establishment in Vienne, was the best restaurant in the wor
ld. He responded, “God, what a meal! One of my great ambitions has been to eat there. I never will—but to think of my little girl guzzling away at ten courses plus champagne is compensatory.”

  Actually, it wasn’t champagne. It was Brut Crémant ’62, a sparkling white wine with a slightly less ebullient fizz than champagne. (If it’s not made in Champagne, it can’t be called champagne, but as far as I was concerned, this was close enough.) Under the benevolent gaze of Monsieur Jean Pierre Cosnard des Closets, the director of our program, I progressed through our ten courses at a table laid with beautiful napery and more forks than I had ever seen in my life, and consumed, in small but inexorable increments, at least half the contents of a bottle that seemed to grow larger with every sip. I never told my father that my newfound capacity for alcohol had sprung not from incipient oenophilia but from fear for my safety. The more I drank, the less there was for Monsieur Cosnard: a prudent strategy, I thought, given that we would soon get into his Mercedes and that he liked to drive eighty-five miles an hour in the two-way passing lane. By the fifth glass, I felt as if I’d taken one too many whirls on a rickety ride at a down-at-the-heel amusement park.

  On the way to Avignon, Monsieur Cosnard asked me to help find the route. I might have done a better job had I held the map right side up.

  8

  Multihyphenate

  My father kept in his files a black-and-white photograph of a portrait painted long before I was born. He sits at a large desk, one hand curled under his chin in Penseur fashion, the other holding an elegant fountain pen, an artfully fanned stack of blank pages ready to receive the words that are about to flow from it. He wears a velvet smoking jacket with a shawl collar and a Byronic white shirt open one button too many. His dark blond hair—always his best feature—billows above his high forehead in a pompadour whose marine undulations, innocent of Vitalis, seem held in place by the sheer power of the brain waves that emanate from below. He looks like a man who’ll be damned if he’ll be cuckolded by either a count or a baron but is working a little too hard to prevent it.

  He also looks like a man who owns a walking stick (he does), smokes expensive pipes he is permitted to enjoy past the break-in period (he does), and has started to lay down a wine cellar (he has).

  When my father returned from Paris to New York, he could tell a Burgundy from a Bordeaux without looking at the shape of the bottle, and knew that although he loved the former, he loved the latter even more. I always suspected this was because Bordeaux are named after châteaux. Castles. The antithesis of an apartment over a Brooklyn drugstore.

  He had to wait six years before he could legally drink either one. Prohibition was repealed in 1933; the American wine industry began to reinvent itself; he no longer had to whisper passwords through speakeasy peepholes, which was a good thing, since he had graduated from pousse-cafés. What a heady time it must have been! For fourteen years, the only wine that had passed most American lips was home-brewed from grape juice, grapes crushed in bathtubs, or “grape bricks,” concentrated blocks that came with painstakingly disingenuous instructions: “Do not place this brick in a one gallon crock, add sugar and water, cover, and let stand for seven days or else an illegal alcoholic beverage will result.” Now hundreds of California wineries (of little interest to my father) were springing up, and dozens of merchants were scrambling to start wine-importing firms (of greater interest). One of these merchants was Frank Schoonmaker, a Princeton dropout who had decided that the best way to turn ignoramuses into customers was to become a wine writer. Schoonmaker became a friend of my father’s and began to teach him about wine. By 1935, two years after Repeal, my father felt ready to start collecting.

  “Brief History of a Love Affair” included a description of his Cellar Book. He capitalized it; so shall I. A Cellar Book is a record of wines, vintages, dealers, costs, and dates of acquisition, accompanied by tasting notes. After making use of the earliest one, published in 1766, one wine lover wrote that a Cellar Book should be “as necessary an appendage to every gentleman’s writing-desk or escritoire as his pocket-book to his pocket.” My father wrote that the date of his own earliest entry was “October 17, 1935, at which time I seem to have laid down a dozen Morey, Clos des Lambrays ’29 at a price ($28) that today induces wistful dreams. ‘Quite beautiful’ is the notation under ‘Remarks.’”

  This is how he ended the essay:

  I turn the pages of my Cellar Book. Two lines, appearing toward the end of The Waste Land, slip unbidden into my mind:

  London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down …

  These fragments I have shored against my ruins …

  When I first read those lines as a child, I had no idea why my father had quoted them, but I knew they were dark. Now I understand that the bottles laid down by the man in the velvet smoking jacket were both a reminder of all he had achieved since leaving Brooklyn and a bulwark against the future. He would get old. His pompadour would turn white. His body would fail. But he would still have these magnificent wines, and they would improve with each passing decade.

  Clos des Lambrays was a Premier Cru Burgundy (since elevated to Grand Cru). Need I mention that 1929 was a Great Year—even though, since only six years had passed, it was not yet fully dusted with the hoar of legend? Twelve bottles of Clos des Lambrays from a comparable year in our own century—say, 2005, the best in recent memory—currently cost about $2,600. In other words, now only the inordinately rich can buy fine wine, whereas in 1935 my father could. Still, $28 was a lot of money (the equivalent of nearly $500 today), and the Clos des Lambrays wasn’t the only case he laid down. How did he afford it?

  He had confounded the expectations of both his family, who had thought he was good for nothing but reading books all day (who could possibly make a living from that?), and his high school classmates. He once told me with a half smile that, perhaps for similar reasons, they had voted him Least Likely to Succeed. Also Politest.

  At twenty-eight, he was still reading books all day, but as the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster. He got his first job there by bringing a folder of one hundred neatly typed book ideas—“not 99 or 101”—to a dinner meeting with Max Schuster. Schuster said, “What makes you think you would be helpful to us?” My father presented his folder and said, “This is it, sir.” One of those hundred ideas, the publication of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cartoons from the New York Evening Post in book form, made Simon & Schuster a small fortune. Soon after his arrival, he commissioned his college friend Whittaker Chambers to translate Bambi from the German (the text was safely apolitical) and, in the first of many instances in which his literary crushes stepped off the page into his own life, invited John Galsworthy (“Id is an Ardt”) to write the introduction. This too was a bestseller. He also published The Complete Wine Book, by his friend Frank Schoonmaker and the Herald Tribune columnist Tom Marvel, which helped tens of thousands of readers graduate from grape bricks to French Burgundies and, according to Ford Madox Ford, left an “admirable aftertaste.”

  At twenty-nine, he was the book critic of The New Yorker. (He preferred to call himself a “reviewer,” observing that “my colleagues and myself are often called critics, a consequence of the amiable national trait that turns Kentuckians into colonels and the corner druggist into Doc.”) He praised Sinclair Lewis and Christina Stead but called Gertrude Stein a “master in the art of making nothing happen very slowly” and William Faulkner “our greatest literary sadist,” an author whose readers deserved, on making it through one of his novels alive, to be met by a brandy-bearing St. Bernard.

  At thirty-four, he was the emcee of Information Please. I heard so many stories around the dinner table about his NBC radio quiz show that its title had a primordial ring, and I was middle-aged before I realized that it came from somewhere else—the request every American in the thirties had made thousands of times to that now-mythic figure, the telephone operator—instead of being the riverhead from which all other iterations had flowed. At i
ts peak, fifteen million people, including Justice Felix Frankfurter and a New York cab driver who tried to avoid fares between 8:30 and 9:00 every Tuesday night, listened to my father preside over a panel of wits who, as Time put it, were “baited, stung, encouraged, wounded” by a series of pointed questions. He was called not only Matador Fadiman but the Toscanini of Quiz, the Grand Inquisitor, and a captain who could play any position, though he once told me he thought of himself as more of a lion tamer. Each week sixty thousand listeners sent in questions. If they stumped the experts, they were awarded prize money (to the thrrring-thrrring of a cash register) and, starting in the second year, a set of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The right answer wasn’t important; what mattered was the pun, the ad lib, the deliciously acidulous riposte. My father considered the quiz format merely an armature around which to build a conversation, one that was friendly but deliberately formal. He and the panelists—columnist Franklin P. Adams, sportswriter John Kieran, and pianist Oscar Levant—always called each other Mister. The guests who joined the panel each week included Mister Hitchcock, Mister Willkie, Mister Woollcott, Mister Karloff, Mister Durante, and two Mister Marxes. Harpo, of course, had to stay in character and therefore said not a word. If he knew an answer, he whistled a snatch from an appropriate popular song; if he didn’t, he repeatedly honked a small horn to drown out the competition. My father asked his panelists to recite the first stanza of “Paul Revere’s Ride”; specify the number of toes they would see in the footprint of a chicken; explain why it was necessary for the Byrd Antarctic Expedition to carry a refrigerator; and distinguish between dodo, zobo, koto, yo-yo, Popo, bolo, and locofoco. On one show, he intoned plummily, “The next question, gentlemen and Mrs. Barrymore”—Ethel was a guest—“demands your closest attention. It cannot be repeated. It comes from Mr. Mort Weisinger, of Great Neck, New York, and is divided into two parts. The first part: What is the name of the author of this question? The second part: Where does he live?” The panel was stumped. On another show, he asked the men in his audience to close their eyes and try to remember the color of their ties. A listener who was driving with his radio on obediently followed these instructions, crashed into a telephone pole, lost a fender, and sued the show’s sponsor. My father was delighted by the reach of his influence.