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BAPTISMAL
named other cocktails. "Trilby" had been drunk back in
the days of the Waldorf sit-down Bar.
In
compliment to
the locale of the play, the Trilby cocktail was made of
one-third French Vermouth and two-thirds Old Tom Gin,
with dashes of Orange Bitters and Creme Yvette.
"Salome," making a tremendous sensation in a single
presentation at the Metropolitan Opera House, in
1907,
was celebrated in a way that might have made Strauss
, weep for · his seidel or his stein of Pilsner. With its
two dashes of Absinthe, cementing half portions of Ital–
ian Vermouth and Dubonnet, the cocktail lacked Ger–
man authorship, but certainly nothing in authority. Mrs.
Les)ie Carter must have heard, when she helped make
David Belasco loom larger on the theatrical map, that
"Zaza" made one of its biggest hits in the form of an
invention of a Waldorf barman. The Zaza cocktail was
somewhat milder than the Salome, for only one-third of
its content was Old Tom Gin, .that being allied with two–
thirds Dubonnet and tw'o dashes of Orange Bitters. And
Charlie Chaplin had a cocktail named in his honor when
he began to make the screen public laugh.
In
those days every big or spectacular event claimed
its appropriate honorification at the hands of those Wal–
dorf dispensers of drink. For example, the first composi–
tion of the Arctic cocktail celebrated Peary's discovery of
the North Pole-or.. where it ought to be; the Doctor
Cook cocktail proclaimed the exposure of a celebrated
polar faker whose very entrails Peary once confessed to
me personally, in effect, he hated; the invention of the
Coronation cocktail was anticipative of the ten minutes'
rest the late King Edward got when they sat him on the
Stone of Scone. The Fin de Siecle came toward the end