Not so long ago, I commented on a column by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity
Fair, in which this well-known toper addressed himself to the theme of "How
To Make Drink One's Slave and Not One's Master." Having already had
rich sport with Hitchens's bizarre excursus on this theme I'll confine
myself here to a sentence in that same column that was widely quoted as an
example of Hitchens' trenchant wit.
It dealt with the matter of how many dry martinis should a
prudent drinker confront at cocktail time.
Here is what Hitchens wrote: "On the whole, observe the same
rule about gin martinis -- and all gin drinks -- that you would in judging
female breasts: one is far too few and three is one too many ... When you
get the shudders, even slightly, it's definitely time to seek help."
Discussing this passage back in February of this year, just
after his Vanity Fair column was published, I decided to pass lightly over
the issue of the shakes. The portly scribbler I had observed a little more
than a year earlier on a Nation cruise experienced some difficulty bringing
a lighted match and the first cigarette of the morning into productive
contact, and his math about the gins was definitely off. As far as dry
martinis go, there's been sound evidence in the past to take Hitchens as a
six-breast guy.
The first time I read the sentence about martinis and breasts it
struck me as creepy. After all, these days, there are a fair amount of women
out there, some of them readers of Vanity Fair, who have had a mastectomy.
Shouldn't his editor at Vanity Fair have gently suggested to Hitchens that
maybe he might want to reconsider the line?
Then I began to wonder whether Hitchens had simply collared the
joke. These days, possible borrowings aren't that hard to check, at least at
an elementary level. I went to the Google search engine on my computer and
typed in "breasts; martinis; Hitchens."
Up came three citations on my original column plus two news
stories, one of them in the Washington Post, crediting Hitchens with the
breasts/martinis quip. At this rate he'll be in Bartlett's with it in a year
or two.
But it's not his line. I slightly refined my search and in five
minutes came across the same line in food and drink columns from the 1990s.
For example a piece by Kathleen Sloan, June 8, 1995, in the eye WEEKLY,
Toronto's arts newspaper, had her offering advice to children taking their
fathers out to dinner, "If he tries to order a third, remind him that
martinis are like a women's breasts: two are perfect, three is just one too
many." Christopher Pyne, a cartoonist, used the line in his "Slappy Says"
strip in early 2001.
On his BK Lounge Web site, dated 2002, Bryan Knox ran the quote
without attribution. I e-mailed him, and he answered that "I heard that
quote for the first time around 1990ish and really am not sure who
originally said it. It sounds a lot like a Johnny Carson quote to me."
Meanwhile, on another Web site devoted to the ever-popular theme
of cocktails, I found the quote attributed to the late great San Francisco
columnist Herb Caen, who died in the late Nineties. Now Caen often wrote
about the therapeutic powers of Vitamin V, aka the vodka martini, and he
seems a likelier candidate than Carson. The line seems a little too edgy for
him. I'm sure Herb used the line in one of his columns, though whether he
claimed to have made it up, I don't yet know.
Why didn't the Vanity Fair checking department google the line,
just to be on the safe side? Well, that's the problem with checking
departments. They never see the wood for the trees.
Where did Hitchens get it from? Maybe from Caen. Why didn't he
throw in one of those cover-your-ass phrases, like "as the old tag goes ...
" Too many six-breast martini evenings and your memory goes. Next thing you
know, Hitchens will be claiming he captured Baghdad single-handedly. The
only question the checker will ask him is whether he'd had two or three
martinis under his belt at the time.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
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