Way back when, Zemblanity was a suit and tie sort of place. Mr. Charles and his partners, Kitt Caruso and Billy Mann, would stand at the omelet buffet and would make custom omelets for guests while each wearing three-piece suits. They would sometimes cook pies and casseroles and the like in similar attire. All the waiters wore suits. All the male guests wore suits and the women wore dresses. I asked Mr. Charles when dress code stopped being enforced.
“Oh, my word, some time in the seventies I suppose. That’s when everything seemed to get so much more casual. We dressed in suits in the fifties because everyone wore suits in the fifties. Everything was so much more formal then, so much more naïve. Now everyone thinks they know more than you do. Back then we were so spontaneous, this restaurant was so wild!”
I thought it over awhile and asked him why things had changed. Why don’t we play crazy pranks anymore or act wild and spontaneous at the restaurant?
“Well, you see, back then it was only the ‘it’ crowd stopping in to eat with us. I remember when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly stumbled down our stairs. They were just back from France where they had been filming To Catch A Thief, you know, the Hitchcock movie? Well, I think they must have been having a little affair because Grace didn’t seem to care at all what she looked like and had that glow about her.
“Anyhow, for a few years this was the scene, the crème de la crème and that was all it took to keep us in business. That’s what created the lines outside. And you have to keep that momentum for years and years. Now that we’ve had that momentum for so long, it’s self-perpetuating. On the other hand, it isn’t as many of the celebrities, or as many of the young and fashionable. They will always find new hotspots. Now we mostly have families and tourists. They don’t take outlandishness very well, do they?
“You know that Andy Warhol used to come in here out of the blue…”
At this point Mr. Charles begins in on a story I had heard him tell several times about how Andy Warhol would come in and place a copy of Interview Magazine (of which Warhol was editor) on every table without a word of explanation. The kicker was that when he left, everyone would ask who that strange fellow had been and Mr. Charles would say “Andy Warhol” and everyone would freak.
“All he ever seemed to say was ‘Wow…’” Mr. Charles imitates Warhol’s fey, stoned-out-of-his-mind way of speaking. “You know, he used to have a crush on me. I’ve told you about those 32 drawings that he gave me.” Here, Mr. Charles shows me a picture of the portrait that Andy drew of him. “You see the little heart there? They’re all covered in little hearts. But I couldn’t be with him because I was with my partner Kitt.”
Kitt Caruso, one of the other founders of Zemblanity, died of AIDS a number of years ago.
This was probably the most that Mr. Charles ever said to me at once so I decided to keep him talking. I asked him about where he had met his friend August. August is a long-time friend of Mr. Charles who stops in from Palm Springs for a week or two every so often.
“Oh, I met August at the disco.”
Studio 54?
“Of course! My god we used to have such wild times. It had been a theater before. Well, they took out all the seats and made the dance floor but kept the stage in tact. The bar ran in front of the stage and they kept all the box seats in the balcony. At four in the morning, they opened a bridge, which extended through the air across the theater. People would go dancing across it and oooh, if you looked down it was so terrifying but that was part of the kick. And the drugs… and all the sex…”
I heard it was real hard to get in. How did you always get by the bouncers?
“They knew us, for goodness sakes! We were all so famous then. And it was their job to let us in. That’s how you start a successful club. You get all the right people in. Annette and I would waltz right in the front door while all the Plebes waited in line (that’s what we called the people, Plebeians). I should show you a picture I have of Annette in a shag bikini I made for her. You wouldn’t even believe it. And the dancing was just out of this world!”
Here’s a quote I found from an article about Andy Warhol biographies in the New Yorker by Louis Menand which, I think, augment’s Mr. Charles’ memories in an interesting way:
“The culture around Warhol was a culture of high artifice—it’s icon was the drag queen—and the gossip, the posing, and the pretense were part of that. They do not make reliable history.”
For some strange reason or another, Old Miss Annette decided to open up on the very same topic during the very same shift. In the end, she expressed the regret of the restaurant’s soul very succinctly: “We just got too famous for our own good.”
But then, as if the restaurant were itself arguing for its continuing intrigue, a middle-aged woman came up and put her arms around Miss Annette. They chatted and commented on how well the other looked and Annette took this woman a very nice table. When Miss Annette came back, she said something which has baffled me profoundly:
“That woman used to come in here once a week in the eighties. She would come in with this really good looking guy. They both worked for NASA and their job…” At this point, she sort of stops and chuckles. “… Their job was to have sex on spaceships. I don’t know why, some sort of experiment. So I started talking to her about this just now and she said, ‘Annette, I just can’t believe you remember what my job used to be.’ And I said, ‘How many people do you think have jobs where they have sex on spaceships?’
I didn’t get a chance to ask this woman, who is now apparently a painter, how or why or what the hell this sex work for NASA could have possibly had been motivated by. This woman and her project, like so many things at Zemblanity, remain mysteries.
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