Mad Dogs & Englishmen April Newsletter
There is a pub in Henley on Thames where it's said George Harrison, who lived on the edge of that small upmarket town, held court occasionally. It was said he stood in the upstairs bar overlooking the river, next to a plaque proclaiming Princess Grace of Monaco once cheered on her brother at the Henley Royal Rowing Regatta in this very spot.
It was said he liked the local ale, Brakspears, and that he refused to sign autographs and would get annoyed if he was approached for one. It was said he always smelled of some strong Indian hemp cologne and wore Hari Krishna beads but never took the Hari Krishnas into the pub with him. It was said he liked to drink with a few local musicians, pop singers from a bygone era. The guy who wrote Whiter Shade of Pale, for example, and the 60s cockney rocker Joe Brown. It was said he was often accompanied by a cocker spaniel he had bought for his son and in whom the boy showed no interest. In the Little Angel pub on the Henley bridge, the Grace Kelly plaque remains untouched, but no such memorial remains for good old George. It was like he was never there.
Quite a few famous people ventured into the old Mad Dogs. The guy who wrote Walk Away Renee, a Presidential candidate, Andrew Someone or other, Basil Fawlty himself, John Cleese and Muhammad Ali's trainer, Angelo Dundee, all leap to mind. Or almost. Hosts from the Home Shopping Network were positively in abundance, as I remember it.
Several Macdill top brass would grace us from time to time, courtesy of the Colonel, the other original founder. It wasn't exactly Oscar night on the red carpet, you understand, but if you hang on enough years, minor celebrities appear just due to the law of averages. Even the lawyer who represented serial killer Aileen Wuornos drank there on occasion, regaling us with tales of the electric chair. Did you know Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's official hangman for over two decades, opened a pub when hanging was abolished and named it The Last Drop? Macabre but true. Oddly, most famous people get fed up when they are recognized and even more fed up when they're not.
Thirty four years, three fights, eight break-ins, two epileptic fits, one heart attack, walk outs, walk ins, credit cards left, credit cards retrieved, marriages, divorces, chefs who threw things, chefs who didn’t, star crossed lovers, and that sprinkling of famous people. BIake Casper, who, with his sister Allison, partnered the Colonel and I in this, the bigger, better version, was a busboy there in the very early 90's. His mother, Bunny, practically the only customer back then, absolutely insisted. "Someone needs to clear the tables, Wilt. You can't expect the customers to keep doing it."
Pubs are like cryptic crosswords.... full of contradictions. In Australia, when I first arrived there in the early 1970s, the men stood in one bar and the women in another. Segregated by choice or custom or both perhaps. One could never be quite sure. Pubs in Adelaide only opened for two hours a day in the 1960s in an attempt to discourage alcoholism. The problem was everyone piled in at 4pm, downed as many drinks as was humanely possible in two hours and rolled out blind drunk at 6pm.
Ideally, life inside a pub should be everything life outside a pub isn't...apolitical, un-stressful, full of exaggeration, and mildly funny. A pub should be long suffering, sexy, confident and broad. A pub is like the last person who said goodbye when you boarded the ship and the first person who greeted you on arrival.
In England pubs without good food are a dying breed. Hubbie is no longer permitted to flee to his local immediately after dinner. Nowadays, he is required to do his share of putting the kids to bed or at least changing the channel. Big TVs and supermarket beer prices killed the local pub as much as bad food and macho turf. Shuttered pubs abound in tiny villages all over the British Isles. Some obscure laws prevent one from purchasing them for a song and refurbishing them into trendy houses. They sit by the side of the road, empty and wanting, with rent signs that advise you to contact the local brewery if you'd like a glamorous life as a landlord. You could live in the flat above and be the kind of twenty-four-hour party host you had always longed to be.
That welcome knock on Christmas morning. "Are you open? Mike, the previous landlord, always opened on Christmas Day. It’s a tradition. If you want to go back to bed, we don't mind pouring our own."