21 Club
1968. The height of the Vietnam War. Campuses were exploding with anti-war fervor. Everywhere, there were protesters. Tear gas and the smell of burning draft cards were in the air. Opposition to the war was both moral and political. In 1964, in the Gulf of Tonkin, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked two United States destroyers, and in retaliation, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. By late 1967, a half million Americans were fighting in Vietnam, over 15,000 soldiers had been killed and 110,000 had been injured. It was costing the United States more than $25 billion per year to fight a war much of the country was against. As many as 40,000 young men were being drafted each month as the anti-war movement in the U.S. grew more violent.
In early 1968, communist Viet Cong forces joined the North Vietnamese army and attacked targets in South Vietnam. This was called the Tet Offensive, the deadliest week of the war: 543 American soldiers were killed in action and 2,547 were wounded. Public support of the war plummeted. And anti-war demonstrations were held in most large US cities and on college campuses all over the world.
It was just a week or so after the Tet Offensive that my parents’ best friends, Caroline and Edwin Gamble, hosted a farewell party for their son, Teddy. He had graduated from an Ivy League college and, in order to avoid being drafted, he applied to and was accepted into the Peace Corps. He was about to leave for Honduras for a three-month training. He would then embark for two years in Nigeria. The farewell party was to be held in Manhattan at the upscale restaurant and bar known as 21, short for the 21 Club. Located on 52nd Street off of Fifth Avenue, 21 was, in my opinion, the most mismatched venue for this particular occasion. I was a sophomore at a liberal college in Ohio and my parents flew me home for the party, which they required me to attend. I was 19. My younger sister, still in high school, was 14.
On Saturday night, February 10, 1968, we arrived by taxi at 21, honoring the Peace Corps volunteer-to-be, Teddy Gamble. When we arrived, we were directed up a sweeping staircase to a party room reserved for “The Gamble Peace Corps Party.” The walls of the room were covered in a beige and brown toile depicting a repetitive pattern of a pastoral scene: a couple having lunch on the grass in a pasture with goats, baby ducks and birds all around them. Covering the floor-to-ceiling windows in this room were voluminous cream-colored chintz draperies, held back with brown twisted silk rope. There were tassels everywhere: on the doorknobs, the window shades, the runner that lined the table displaying dozens of bottles of wine, Scotch and whiskey. I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. My friends at college were demonstrating outside the college president’s house and I was in a toile-covered room in New York City’s lap of luxury. And worse yet, in light of the recent Tet Offensive, Teddy Gamble was being celebrated in a style so offensive, it defied explanation.
The room was packed with elegantly dressed people and the air was saturated with French perfume, the scent of the wealthy. There was a man in a tuxedo playing a grand piano, and waitresses dressed in black dresses (above the knee) with white aprons were milling through the sea of people to take drink orders. My mother and father surveyed the crowd, greeting friends and people they either knew or wanted to know. I remember Richard Rodgers and his wife, Dorothy, were there, friends of the Gambles and now of my parents. Caroline Gamble was surrounded by her colleagues from the United Nations. And Teddy was somewhere in the mix, as though in training to be not a Peace Corps volunteer, but rather a New York socialite.
My mother ordered a glass of wine and my father ordered a whiskey sour, his favorite cocktail. In 1968, the legal drinking age in New York was 18, so I also ordered a whiskey sour. I did not drink much in college, preferring marijuana, but even that I did not do often. I figured I had enough trouble keeping myself on an even keel sober; substances usually scared me. My sister was instructed to order a Shirley Temple, and she looked disappointed and resigned. This was no place to protest anything, certainly not the war or, in her case, parental control. My sister was impish and had developed ways to simultaneously appear compliant and then do whatever she wanted to do. The evening proceeded.
The waitresses were soon passing around trays of sophisticated hors d’oeuvres. While I was watching all the people, some speaking French (Caroline Gamble was raised in Paris), some speaking Italian (I did not know who the Italians were), my sister was sneaking sips of my whiskey sour and my father’s. I listened to the toasts given to Teddy — and because the whiskey was beginning to take hold of my brain, I did not care if anyone saw me roll my eyes. The dissonance between what was transpiring in this room and what was happening in the world got increasingly vivid the more I drank. And my father seemed to be uncharacteristically buoyant. He started dancing with Caroline Gamble, while the pianist played “Fly Me To The Moon.”
My mother was in a corner talking to her publishing cohort. The two men who started Random House were there, close friends of my mother. She was unaware that those of us who were drinking whiskey were getting completely inebriated. My sister told me she thought she was going to throw up, so I helped her find a bathroom quickly. While I was waiting for her, I also started feeling sick. My father soon appeared in the hallway, also looking for a restroom. And then other adults began appearing, all feeling ill and seeking the shelter of any powder room available.
As it turned out, the bartender was using egg whites to create the creamy froth atop the sours. We were all experiencing some kind of food poisoning. I suppose it could have been the whiskey, but the source did not matter a bit while everyone was seeking refuge in the elegant toilettes of the 21 Club. Eventually, word of this mutiny found its way to Caroline and Edwin Gamble. They alerted the Club and before I knew it, taxis were summoned and everyone was being escorted to the exit. Caroline rode in the cab with my sister and me. My mother was in a taxi with my father. I have no idea what happened to the rest of the party: Edwin, Teddy, the fancy people.
My mother spent the remainder of the evening going from bathroom to bathroom in their apartment, holding the heads of her two daughters and her husband over each commode. In the morning, I felt a hangover so severe, I did not know how I was going to get back to college. My mother described her Florence Nightingale experience repeatedly all day to people on the telephone. My sister got a scolding about sneaking sips of alcohol, and I was told that I said some terrible things to Caroline Gamble about Teddy. It was reported that while sobbing, I proclaimed Teddy’s lack of awareness about the war. I said that he was a draft dodger because he was afraid, not because of any belief he had. I cringed thinking Caroline would hold all this against my parents, but I did not care that much. New York was not going to be a place I would return to often. I would not see the Gambles or Teddy more than a few more times during my lifetime. I would be staying away from the East Coast, like a draft resister, as though it were a war, a place I could neither support nor believe in.
Teddy made it through one month of Peace Corps training in Honduras. That was enough for him to know that he was not cut out to live in an underdeveloped country. He returned to New York and someone in his parents’ circle of friends got him an appointment with a physician who wrote a bogus letter saying he had anemia and gastritis, disqualifying him for military service. My sister returned to high school, breaking all kinds of rules covertly. My parents continued their lives in the city, as did the Gambles, and their friendship weathered the turbulence of that sullied evening at Teddy Gamble’s farewell party.
I have not had another whiskey sour nor have I ever again set foot in the 21 Club. The Vietnam War raged for another seven years. I participated in protests on my small radical campus in Oberlin, Ohio, until I graduated in 1970. The world felt unsafe beyond the boundaries of that small town. When I left, I felt lost, maybe the way Teddy had. I knew, however, that I could not return to New York. I needed to find someplace safe and sane where I could finish growing up. Despite the efforts of the Peace Corps, the world today is no more peaceful than it was in 1968. In fact, we are in a far worse state. Our current president makes Lyndon Johnson look like the Dalai Lama. But one thing has remained unchanged throughout all these years: the 21 Club. Except for food poisoning, it remains immune from everything — the ravages of war, the failed attempts for peace. It persists in feting heroes and phonies alike, with food, wine and whiskey into the late hours of each and every night.