23. The real Cobb
Salad was like Champagne
Back in the olden days when I worked in “The Theatre” in
Los Angeles, one of my jobs was as Assistant (The Girl) to Theatre Impresario,
Jimmy A. Doolittle. Mr. D. was a larger
than life character, and though I have read a description calling him “soft-spoken”
I never heard Mr. D. speak softly when he could as well shout.
“Morning, Girl,” would greet me as I opened the door at
8:30 AM to his wonderful mid-century house perched to overlook Hollywood with
another view featuring the Ocean. “If
you’d arrived a little later,” he continued booming, “they’d be closing up shop
out there in New York.” When I suggested
that I could arrive at any time, like even 5 AM, he would chuckle and hit the
dining room table where he was having coffee with enough force to spill his
cup, “do it and we’ll show those lily-livered Theatre producers how it’s really
done.” Of course he did not mean it, and
would no more have been ready to get on with it at 5 AM than I would have. But soft-spoken was not how I would describe
the Jimmy A. Doolittle I worked for in those long-ago days.
We’d commence the mornings with him booming into one or
two phones in the dining room while I sat and chatted up various theatres
across the USA on one or two other phones in the office down the hall. We had exciting visitors; producers and
agents coming to pitch their newest finds.
Sometimes a person who said he
was Jessie Lasky would arrive and perch on my desk to describe one or another
of his thousands of humming birds he said he’d brought in by the plane load
from the Amazon. Or Mr. D. would
gesture me in on calls to the French to take notes about the next production he’d
be bringing in.
Always around 12:30 PM he’d come striding in, all dapper
and ready to “hit the road.” And he
meant it. We’d stride out into the
gorgeous Hollywood day and over to Mr. D’s large Cadillac. Tossing me the keys with “you drive, Girl,”
he’d jump into the passenger seat. My
first time was almost my last. That car
was huge. And I am not very. I could not see over the steering wheel and
had to look through it to see where we were heading. If traffic was particularly packed he’d start
getting antsy. “Don’t stop, Girl, for
anything. Just don’t do it.”
“But, Mr. D., there’s a red light.” Or, “But Mr. D., there’s a person crossing
the street.”
“Run the damn fool over, Girl, just run him over.”
“Mr. Doolittle, you know I cannot run over that person.”
“Some driver is not going to see you stop, Girl, and will
run into the back of us. Then where
would we be?” He’d chew on that one a
while as I continued up and over to The Greek Theatre where we’d start the
outing.
We’d check on the current productions,
and discuss with the box office the returns and then get to the business office
to see what was coming in and discuss where the various performers were staying
and when they were arriving. When Mr. D.
was satisfied that The Greek was doing its job keeping Los Angeles entertained
with the best in Dance and Music during the warm summer nights, we were off
hitting the road again. This time was a
little easier, as it was practically down- hill, over to the Huntington
Hartford Theatre on Vine Street. There
we checked on rehearsals and into that box office to check receipts and then
backstage to chat with the stage hands and the cast if there was a show in
rehearsals.
And now Mr. D. would look at his watch. Pretty soon I knew that this meant we were
about to hit the road once more. But
this time we just crossed it. We’d cross
Vine Street to the Brown Derby restaurant, getting there just as lunch was
winding down.
Mr. D. loved this time of
day maybe most of all. He loved that
restaurant, and he really enjoyed Mrs. Cobb.
As soon as we’d enter and he’d shout, “Here we are!” Mrs. Cobb would appear to greet him, her
friend, Jimmy. Soon we’d be seated with
her at her special table and the menus arrived.
The first time there for me, Mr. D. grabbed the menu out of my hand. “The
Girl does not need a menu,” he announced to Mrs. Cobb. I wondered if that meant The Girl did not get
to eat, just drive the impresario about.
But of course not: Mr. D. was a
most delightful, though loud, and thoughtful person. He was just showing The Girl all about what
one did at the Brown Derby. So the Girl
surrendered the menu which was snatched by the waiter. And Mrs. Cobb began to hold forth making the
order for our lunch. She said I had to
have The Cobb Salad, and Mr. D. beamed. He too was having one he
announced. And Mrs. Cobb told the waiter
to make it Cobb Salads all around.
We talked and perhaps had a glass of wine while we
waited. Mrs. Cobb showed me about and
talked about Hollywood history and pointed out some famous producers just
ending their lunches. Of course soon
they were over at the table to say hello and good-bye and see your
tomorrow. And our Cobb Salad arrived.
Today Cobb Salads are served in restaurants from
Portland, Maine to Honolulu. They are
all made up of chopped and similar ingredients.
But please believe me none of these is a real Cobb Salad. When the long white platter arrived I was
visually stunned. It looked like an
arrangement of gems all set in rows next to each other down the length of the platter. Each ingredient had been shopped so finely
and into such perfect squares that what I really wanted to see were the tiny
hands and sharp knives that had made such enchantment. The tomatoes had been peeled and seeded and cut
into the tiniest of rubies; the eggs, yokes and white presented separately for
color variation, were again cut into crisp squares. How? Do not ask me. But there the individual tiny morsels lay,
white and orangey-yellow; the various lettuces also were chopped into tiny bits
which crispy were defined from each
other while all being together. It was
an amazing production, and one which made Mr. D. beam. The head waiter arrived with a large bowl
into which he mixed the ingredients he had at hand for the special creamy
vinaigrette. As he did he had a sort of
running incantation praying the ingredients into perfection. “The Coleman Mustard,” he tossed into the
bowl golden dust, “juice of a real California lemon,” he squeezed, “olive oil
all the way from Italy, like me,” he poured and swirled, “salt from the sea.” Into this perfection he would crumble some Roquefort
cheese which was also in tiny dice on the platter. This ingredient, he told me, made the sauce
perfect once he got it to the right consistency. This he did vigorously as he talked. And voila! The sauce was done. Mrs. Cobb put in a delicate finger and
licked. “Yes, perfect,” she
approved. And so the ingredients were
added from the platter. “Each must go in at the right moment for that perfect
salad,” she explained, “the egg-yokes last.”
And the golden pieces were added
to the whole wonder, with the crumbled Roquefort just on top, “like snow”, the
waiter began to serve. I know there were small dices of purple black
olives “from Santa Barbara up the coast,”
though I do not see them anymore in the list of ingredients. And, “avocado from Mrs. Cobb’s garden”.
Mr. D was ready; his napkin on his chest. Large spoonsful of this lovely salad were put
into our plates. “Let the lunch begin,” Mr. Doolittle sounded a little
chastened in the presence of true gastronomic delight.
On the way home, “back to work”, Mr. Doolittle was quiet,
thinking about I guess that wonderful salad Mrs. Cobb had invented late one
night for a hungry husband, made up, she said, of things they used all day in
the restaurant. She herself had chopped
that first salad and her husband said it was perfection. At first, she remembered, it was not on the
menu. But her husband liked it so much
that he had one almost every day. His
guests would see this vision arrive, but they could not find on the menu. So the rest is part of gastronomic – and Hollywood
– history.
As is Jimmy A. Doolittle, the great and booming and
charming Theatre impresario.
Strangely I could not find one photo of Mr. Doolittle to
add to this blog, though his office was filled with them of him with his many
stars and discoveries. Nor one of Mrs.
Cobb, though her restaurants will also filled with those of her and her husband
and their famous clients and guests. I could
find some of the Huntington Hartford Theatre, renamed The Jimmy Doolittle not
many years before Mr. D’s death in 1997.
And naturally, some of the famous Hollywood Brown Derby. I did search too for photos of a real Cobb
Salad but that has gone the way of the DoDo bird, never more to be seen.
I call the real Cobb salad like Champagne. All the ingredients were so perfectly
prepared, “composed” as the French would say, and so delicately joined together
that the taste of the whole was seamless, not one ingredient standing out from
the other, the whole a deliciousness; as
is a great Champagne. The Pinot Noir does not stand apart from the Chardonnay,
nor the Pinot Meunier from the rest of the trio: a perfect blend of flavors. While in Champagne the gas of life, CO2
streams into the consumer’s system elevating one’s mood to ethereal, in a real Cobb
Salad the delights of such scrumptiousness elevate the mood too, as I can
remember in a more tranquil Jimmy Doolittle after his Cobb Salad “fix”. So I do proclaim the real Cobb Salad to be
like Champagne. And Jimmy Doolittle too,
a character so bubbly he truly can be called Champagne-like.
