RESTAURANTS : Harry’s in Paris, Chandler Style

There wasn’t a Chandler of a mystery as to when The Big Hangover began. Or when it would end.

Cold rain grayed over the city. Slip the avenue by the Olympia, pass beneath Harry’s buzzing orange neon, licking rain from my lip. Thinking any city worth the name’s, got one worth the same. A haunt. A cozy. A place where dark wood, custom and rail define history. Where drinks don’t come with paper umbrellas and time passes slower over the edge of a glass.

Smoky jukes like Musso and Frank, Pete’s Tavern in New York, any pub in Ireland, Harry’s New York Bar in Paris. . . .

I go to Harry’s when it rains. It rains a lot in Paris.

It was dusky and quiet and a bartender moved moth-like against the faint glitter of piled glassware.

--”The High Window”

Bernard the barman set a Bloody Mary together in front of me. Simple, straight up in a water tumbler. Four ice cubes. Tap salt and pepper. Lemon. Lea & Perrins. Good vodka. Enough Tabasco to singe. Good quality tomato juice. No fruit salad.

“No celery salt,” Andy’s rich French-Scot burr drifted above me. Roll the glass between flat palms to stir. No spoon, no shaker.

“It’s a combination, I think,” he touted the virtuous Bloody Mary, tamping another Chesterfield, “of the vitamin in the lemon, the nourishment of the tomato and a hair of the dog that bit you in the vodka.

“But it has to be made fresh! The way it was intended. The original ‘20s recipe,” at the original Harry’s.

Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer in a cocktail bar.

--”Red Wind”

It’s a catchall sort. Straight and narrow shotgun American-style cocktail bar in a city of 10,000 cafes. A saloon. College pennants and bric-a-brac. Racked newspapers. Wooden stools. A tabled back room. Short-counter bar where “Pete” Petiot invented the Bloody Mary in ’21.

Then, it was simply the New York Bar, opened in 1911 by American jockey Todd Sloan (barred from racing for throwing the English Derby--the “Little Johnny Jones” scandal) and his partner Clancey, who simply dismantled his New York saloon, called Clancey’s, and piece-by-pieced it to Paris. A Dundee Scot, Harry MacElhone, and his ever-present cigars, arrived to tend the Thanksgiving opening and a decade later he bought the place out.

Harry and son Andy gave the place atmosphere. The legends and characters followed. Charlie the French bartender with the Hoboken accent. Robert the Waiter and Tall Emile with hammer and nails.

For 40 years, the famous Hemingway passed in and out at Harry’s. Fitzgerald dreamed novels here, sipping pearled martinis twice as big as the Ritz’s ‘round the corner. Harry invented the sidecar while downstairs Gershwin banged “An American In Paris” and customers complained about “the piano-tuning session.”

Home to expatriates, the lonely and the curious; the sort of place to work its way into a hundred customer’s novels from Hemingway to Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt” and Ian Fleming’s James Bonds. It’s a neighborhood hang for an odd corner of the world.

“I don’t know why writers drink,” Andy said, stretching an ashtray across the elbow-rubbed Cuban mahogany. “I only know that writers do . Maybe because it’s a good thing to do. Maybe it loosens up their inhibitions.”

When Andy talks about writers, you listen. His memories and impressions span from Hemingway (“first time I met him I was 5 or 6. His son Jack and I played together”) and “Scott” Fitzgerald (“a memory of a very white person, very pale face with pale eyes”) to bonded friendship with Thornton Wilder and weekend skeet shoots with James Jones. In a Harry’s lifetime, he poured for the “Lost Generation,” French postwar writers Sartre, De Beauvoir and Prevert, watched Cronkite’s bird imitations and hosted every journalist who ever hunt-and-pecked the place out, witnessing Paris’ transition from “big village to city,” in the process.

It held the note of a half pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness and a touch of pure idiocy.

--”Killer in the Rain”

“June 14, 1940. I’ll never forget that date, we saw the first German motorcycle on the Avenue de l’Opera. Harry turned to me, said, ‘This is a good time to leave!’ So we pulled down the big iron gate, grabbed a suitcase and left.”

Escaping through Bordeaux, they tended bar at London’s Cafe de Paris till it was blitzed out of existence. Afterward, Harry served at the Ritz; Andy served with the British army. Harry’s served German officers as an occupied business. In June ‘44, Hemingway (in Harry’s absence) presided over the reopening during Paris’ liberation. Later, Harry was among the first five civilians allowed into France on strictly personal business.

“These days, we get a lot of out-of-town people coming here as a first-aid station. A lot of bachelors,” Andy noted, pointing towards a solitary sitter, whose eyes seemed as fragile as my own. I was a little too familiar with the sentiment. “It’s not like it was, though, from what Harry told me. Not like it was in the ‘20s when everyone dressed up in dinner jackets.”

And when Harry invented the Champagne Pick-Me-Up. Two drops of bitters over crushed ice. “Two ounces of cognac,” Andy prescribed, “a glug of grenadine, lemon juice, shake well and add champagne to fill the glass.”

A black pool opened at my feet, I dived in.

--”Farewell, My Lovely”

The Tabasco singe set into my eyes. “If you suffer,” Andy stubbed a cigarette, “you think you’re getting cured.”

“Of course, the traditional cure,” he winked, “depends on the degree of your hangover. Moderate, family sized or hard-core.” A pained look slipped to his eyes. Examining my expression, he endorsed the Prairie Oyster. “It’s not really a drink. It’s a potion. With a 50/50 chance, it’ll either cure or. . . . Take an old-fashioned glass. Salt. Pepper. Tabasco. Vinegar. A spoonful of Sherry or dry vermouth.”

“Sounds great,” I cracked foxy.

“It was invented in America,” he continued. “Stir it. No ice. Drop in a raw egg yolk. And the idea is to swallow it all at once.”

“Cure like that’d put you off drinking all together.”

“That’s the tradition.”