André Simon with the young Hugh
Johnson in the Hyde Park Gate offices of the Wine & Food Society (as it then was). This photograph appeared
in the Times in 1963.
I was 22 when we first met;
André only 84. His name was already a legend to me: I had joined the
Cambridge University Wine & Food Society as an undergraduate. His
presidential presence loomed behind our activities. And active we
were - London's finest wine merchants made regular visits to
indoctrinate their future customers. The annual Varsity tasting match
celebrated its 50th year in 2002.
Nor were we raised on a strict diet of the
classics. In 1959 we had our introduction to the wines of California - remarkably avant-garde in those days. California was already my El Dorado; I had
spent the summer there, aged 18, and I knew I would be going back.
But in 1961 I was a very junior hack at
Condé Nast Publications when I was sent to interview the great André in his
office in Grosvenor Gardens. I remember my first impression clearly. He sat with
his back to the window, the sunlight making a halo of his curly white hair. His
hand was huge; his accent as studied as Maurice Chevalier's, his figures of
speech and choice of phrases deliciously oblique. He was fond, whether speaking
or writing, of parables. I can't remember by which parable he let me know that I
could be useful to him.
André had been carrying the Society on his broad
shoulders for a long time. During the Depression he had achieved miracles of
morale-boosting gastronomy, holding dinners at the Café Royal which showed how
good "fare", as he called it, need not be expensive. Through his friendship with
Oliver Simon of the Curwen Press, high-quality printers hidden down in Plaistow
near the Docks, he had even found paper to keep his quarterly Wine & Food
going throughout the war.
At 84 he was looking cautiously around, I
suspect, for the means to assure that his Society survived him. He also had
wanderlust; he wanted to see the world rather than sit in an office. One of the
means of release in sight was Condé Nast, whose chairman, Harry Yoxall, had
started the English edition of Vogue and was a discriminating lover of Burgundy.
I never heard them discussing me, but I am sure Yoxall must have said "I'll let
you have young Johnson", or words to that effect.
Another thought, which certainly never occurred
to me at the time: André had started his career in what used to be called Grub
Street during his French military service, aged 20, as subeditor of the Revue de
l'Artillerie. Did he perhaps see in this fresh-faced Englishman an echo of his
own start? Or even a means of revenge?
Whatever he thought, I found my duties as a
copywriter on Vogue, and subsequently House & Garden too, increasingly
steered towards wine, and specifically the Wine & Food Society. I wish I
could find my diary for 1962. The 1963 one is pretty laconic, but increasingly
includes meetings with André and lunches with Madeleine Heard, the Society's
formidable matronly Secretary, often at Verrey's, a robustly old-school French
restaurant at Oxford Circus.
My copy of the Winter 1962 number Wine & Food
reveals (I scribbled all over it) my deeper involvement. In the Spring 1963
number I am named as Editor, André as Editor in Chief and Harry Yoxall as
Consultant. It was the first ever to have illustrations (they were line
engravings I scrounged where I could). And it included its first article by
Elizabeth David, whom, my diary reminds me, I took to lunch at the United
University Club in Pall Mall (whatever did she make of that?) on André's 86th
birthday, February 28.
That was quite a day. In the afternoon I went to
the Sunday Times to see another famously formidable lady, Ernestine Carter, to
begin my stint as the wine man on that paper (on the fashion pages). And in the
evening it was André's birthday dinner at the Savoy, where the menu was Consommé
riche au Fumet des Pommes d'Amour, paillettes dorées au Chester, Quenelle de
Saumon Neptune, Suprême de Volaille Favorite (Pommes Amandines, Brocoli
Milanaise),
Parfait Glacè Prâliné Savoy and Le Gâteau Anniversaire Café. And the wines La Riva Fino,
Wiltinger Klosterberg 1959, Château Ducru-Beaucaillou 1952, Pol Roger White Foil,
Bisquit Dubouché VSOP. What a history of change there is in that wine list:
sherry, hock, claret, champagne ... it sounds like the 19th century. And I
suppose it was.
My diary, alas, only gives me glimpses of that
year. I can tell you what I gave my father for his birthday (stogies). I went to
Bristol to see Harry Waugh and to Bordeaux to do a story on the chateaux for
House & Garden - and met the Marquis de Lur-Saluces, the old-school
grandee of Yquem. In September I went to New York (I was writing for American Vogue) and met yet another formidable lady, and André's sparring partner for
many years, Jeanne Owen. There were, shall I say, political difficulties between
the New York chapter of the Society and headquarters. I wish I could say that my
visit did anything to reduce them.
Suddenly, on November 18, 1963, my diary notes
"made Gen. Sec. of W&F. Soc." The entry for November 20 goes some way towards
explaining the suddenness, or at least the date: "André S. to Australia, Canberra,
Waterloo, 3:30". That for November 22 has a totally different resonance:
"President
Kennedy assassinated".
At this point, at least for a while, I wrote
almost daily entries. They record a life among the fleshpots I can scarcely
believe was mine. André had just moved the Society's office from Grosvenor
Gardens, where he was the tenant of the Rev Marcus Morris and his National
Magazine Company, to the offices of another well-wisher, George Rainbird, at 2
Hyde Park Place. Rainbird was a successful publisher; his books incorporated
colour photography in ways that changed international coedition publishing. A
few doors down from Marble Arch, 2 Hyde Park Place overlooks the Park; it's a
dignified and leafy setting, and only ten minutes' walk from the Connaught Hotel,
which began to play a surprisingly large part in my life.
André has often been described as having a
peasant's instincts. He certainly knew how many postage stamps there were in the
desk drawer. He counted them on each morning's visit to the office; he remembered
each letter coming in and going out. How to reconcile this with my diary
entries - "lunch Quaglino's", "lunch Ivy", "dinner Mirabelle",
"lunch Trader Vic's"
and, frequently, lunch or dinner Connaught - is a bit of a puzzle. At the
age of 24 I was signing the bill at places I now visit at intervals of years.
But then I was learning a rather odd kind of trade.
Before he disappeared to Australia André gave me
some basic training in how to negotiate with a banqueting manager. They are not
lessons you could apply today, when there are waiting lists at every restaurant
you would want to go to. One lesson I vividly remember applied to a magnificent
room at a hotel I will not name. A canny organizing secretary was well advised
to sit in a strategic seat to keep an eye on the proceedings in a mirror. The
mirror reflected the doorway behind the service screen, where waiters bring
bottles in, and sometimes take them out....
André was away four months, travelling on from
Australia to New Zealand, and home by sea. We had a Christmas dinner at the Ivy
two weeks after he left, then dinners at Martinez, a Spanish restaurant famous
for its tiled patio (we drank a 1933 Rioja and an 1830 Oloroso); at Quaglino's;
at Trader Vic's - my special favourite - with Paul Masson's new "varietal"
wines; and a Hungarian dinner at the Law Society, an odd arrangement in
retrospect, but an exciting introduction to the beauty of Tokaji.
The happy pattern continued on André's return in
March 1964. By this time Wine & Food was becoming more ambitious. We were
publishing Philippe de Rothschild's poetry, translated by Christopher Fry; a sad
goodbye to the bars of Les Halles as the market heart of Paris was demolished;
more Elizabeth David; the first work of Alan Davidson, then a diplomat in North
Africa, on Mediterranean seafood; Evelyn Waugh on champagne; a gourmet gardening
series; even short stories; and of course André's epic account of what he ate
and drank and with whom in the Antipodes.
Memorable Meals was still our equivalent of
Jennifer's Diary; the spiritual heart of the magazine; the place where
hospitality, generosity and occasionally plain vulgar ostentation were
chronicled. Although one meal, and not the least memorable, consisted of bread
and margarine and cocoa on the deck of a warship about to land troops in Italy.
My most memorable meal at the time, (the competition was stiff) was a lunch at
André's home in Sussex, Little Hedgecourt. He invited Elizabeth David and Jim
Beard, America's food guru, a genial giant with Humpty Dumpty's figure and just as
much hair. I collected Jim at his hotel in my Mini. I don't remember how we got
him in and out of it, but I do remember his laughter. Lunch was in André's
much-loved garden (gardening, after books, was his off-duty passion) and was an
example of his creed of simplicity, not always observed in the Society's
banquets. We ate a roast chicken and drank Château Lafite.
To André the acts of writing and editing were
almost sacred. He loved printer's ink, as he said, almost as much as wine and
would take rare books from the shelves of his amazing library in Evelyn Mansions
to caress them with his huge hands. One day he showed me his one page of a
Gutenberg Bible, the first European printing, which lived in a leather folio.
The jet black precision of the impression was almost startling; its perfection
strangely moving. "Printing was perfect at the start," André said.
"It has never
been better than this."
Back from Australia and New Zealand he was
working on the Wines, Vineyards and Vignerons of Australia, to be published in
1966; an incredibly far-sighted project, when Australian wines beyond the
Invalid Port variety were still unknown in Britain. He instigated the 100-guinea
André Simon Award for the literature of gastronomy in February 1965 at the
Fanmaker's Hall and awarded it to Cyril Ray for The Compleat Imbiber Number
7.
Then he set off for a tour of South Africa. "11:20, Waterloo. ALS to Pretoria
Castle".
My life was also changing. I was writing more for
American magazines; I had met my future wife, Judy Grinling (at vintage time
1964, at Château Loudenne in the Médoc); and I was aiming to write a book. To my
future father-in-law's alarm I proposed to his daughter and resigned my job at
Condé Nast - which meant the editorship of Wine & Food - in the
same month.
I continued to work on the Society's affairs,
organizing dinners, but André and Harry Yoxall had already lined up my two
successors: John Hoare as General Secretary and Julian Jeffs as Editor. My diary
records little let-up in the browsing and sluicing; visits to Claridge's, Le
Caprice, the Ecu de France, Wolfe's (the mould-breaking restaurant started by
David Wolfe) continue. So do tastings at shippers' offices, hotels and livery
halls. And, I'm happy to see, almost daily riding from livery stables in Hyde
Park. Would my liver have stood the strain without? How did André's?
I stepped down officially from the Society's
affairs on June 21, 1965, when Judy wrote in my diary "André to lunch. What
shall we give him?" I wish I had recorded the answer, but I suspect it was Judy's
favourite, poulet à l'estragon. I was signed up to write my first book,
Wine,
and we set off together to do the research all over Europe. The total immersion
it entailed kept me away from the Society, though not from occasional lunches
and dinners with André. When our first daughter, Lucy, was born, and duly taken
to Little Hedgecourt for inspection, André gave her a basket of pullet's eggs;
one for each week of her just-beginning life.
And there was a working sequel, too. In 1967
André confessed he dreaded the coming winter. His sight was too poor to read
any more - and just as bad he could no longer see the food on his plate. I
suggested he look for local help with a Dictaphone and a typist to dictate a
fresh batch of memoirs. (His first, By Request, came out when he was only 80). A
week or two later I called to ask about progress. "I can't manage the new-fangled
machine," he said, "but, hallelujah, I find I can still type on my old machine." It
certainly was old: a stand-up model from the 1920s. And it had a problem: when the
carriage came to the end of the line the bell didn't ring. I asked to see the
already plump manuscript, only to find that the last word or two of each line
had been typed on the roller rather than the paper.
But the memoirs were marvellous; much better, in
my view, than By Request. His memory, though spasmodic, was in overdrive. He
asked me to help with what came out, in 1969, as In the Twilight, with the fine
paper and binding that George Rainbird had promised, and André richly deserved. |
