Death by Pad Thai

Author:Douglas Bauer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307494788
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2006-03-22T21:00:00+00:00

My Dinner with

Andy Warhol’s Friends

Michael Stern

THE ONE MEAL I FEAR I SHALL NEVER FORGET WAS IN A RESTAURANT. Its telltale moment came at the very beginning when glasses of water arrived. We were a table of four at New Jersey’s old Clam Broth House, the place Jane and I had chosen as the right location to host a welcome-to-the-USA dinner for Thomas Ammann, Switzerland’s leading art dealer, and his good friend Mathias. The waiter managed to carry four full tumblers in one hand so that his fingers, sunk deep in each below the waterline, looked like brined sausage links and his thumb functioned to align the quartet as heset them all in the center of the table. In his other hand was a basket piled high with packets of saltine crackers, some of which bounced out onto the table when he plopped it down. He used the front of his shirt to wipe our drinking water off his meaty mitt, then reached into his ass pocket for an order pad. “What’ll it be?” said he.

And so began the night of a thousand embarrassments. Actually, it began well before dinner, when we drove from our house in Connecticut into New York to pick up our Swiss guests at the townhouse where they were staying on the Upper East Side. But before I share the gruesome details—before, during, and after the meal from hell—I need to explain how we wound up in a loutish fish house in Hoboken trying to show two European sophisticates a good time in America.

The year before, 1971, Jane and I had spent a week in Switzerland so I could interview the expatriate Hollywood director Douglas Sirk, subject of my thesis in film history at Columbia University. Douglas and his wife, Hilde, had made their home down in the lake city of Lugano, but knowing that this was our first trip abroad and being a gentlemanly fellow, he had advised us beforehand that when we arrived we would be met in Zurich by two young friends of his, Mathias and Thomas. He assured us they would be wonderful companions for our first evening in one of the great cities of Europe.

Travel novices, we were in the throes of a dizzying fog of jet lag when the phone in our Zurich hotel room rang and woke us from fitful naps. It was dinnertime. Mathias and Thomas were downstairs. We shook their hands as they welcomed us speaking surprisingly good English. They had a large car and uniformed driver waiting in the street to take us all to dinner, but in our confusion and naiveté, the ride’s class was lost on us. We perceived the two of them as fresh-faced boys from the Swiss mountains—happy yokels who, in the spirit of so many admirable guys in Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, represented the goodness of nature and of a simple life spent yodeling in fresh air.

At the restaurant they chose, we ate delicious veal sausage and rösti potatoes and a roast beef dish called Robespierre served from a rolling silver cart.

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