Word: ginning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...inventor of the dry martini is lost in history's haze. Some romantic gin-and-vermouth scholars say it was St. Martin of Tours, patron of tosspots. Others hold that a tipsy barkeep at San Francisco's Palace Hotel happened on the formula by accident before World War I. The Italian vermouth company, Martini & Rossi, is sometimes credited with first honors, and an 1862 bartender's manual describes a "martinez" which contains the basic ingredient but adds maraschino and bitters. Whatever its origin, there is no doubt that the martini is America's favorite cocktail...
...cult has developed, the martini has suffered abominations that would have doomed a lesser drink. Johnny Solon, an unlamented mixologist at the old Waldorf bar, diluted the basic gin and vermouth with orange juice and called it a Bronx-a cheerless drink now well on its way to oblivion. Others have polluted the martini with grenadine, mint sprigs, anchovies, crystallized violets, sherry, absinthe, and even Chanel No. 5. They are still at it: last week Washingtonians were drinking something called a "dillytini"-a martini with a two-inch green bean, pickled in dill vinegar-which tastes, according to one experimenter...
With a bottle of tonic and some gin...
...young widower, Sinatra gives a kind of bubble-gum snap to his role, and delivers just about as much substance. Young Eddie (The Music Man) Hodges is fine as the child who plays gin rummy with his father at 4 o'clock in the morning. As the feverish businessman who cannot fathom the playboy's vagaries, Edward G. Robinson has an intonation and gesture to fit every line-and all the best lines are his. To a cab driver who cynically returns a ten-cent tip: "What'sa matter, you don't need a dime...
Forbidden Fruit. In 1927, Belle landed in Manhattan-"fifty-two and fat." There was only $2 in her purse, but there was plenty of gin in the old girl yet. Within six months she opened the first of her three speakeasies, in a mansion on East 52nd Street-it was not a saloon, she insisted, but a salon. For entertainment Belle featured such "continental bizarrie as will be cayenne to the jaded mental tongue." For refreshment she offered the usual bootleg booze, champagne (at $30 a bottle) for the discriminating. One night she dared to charge Al Capone...