The 6:09 to New Canaan

By Dan Covell

In 2016, my spouse and I moved to New Canaan in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and we lived there until 2022. During that time, I reconnected with some friends living in and around New York City, and some or all of the group would convene regularly for amiable “gentlemen’s lunches” in Manhattan. It was during these repasts that I first came to experience some of borough’s most venerated and venerable eateries, including La Grenouille – the site of our inaugural conclave, as well as the 21 Club, Delmonico’s, Gallagher’s, the Grand Central Oyster Bar, the Grill (nee the Four Seasons), Joe Allen, Keene’s, Le Veau D’Or and the Minetta Tavern. Although I now live farther from the city, I still get back to these places, or rather the ones that are still open (regrets to the dearly departed La Grenouille and 21 Club) or have recently reconstituted (Le Veau D’Or and the Grill).

Lunch was and is often followed by a round or two of cigars at the Carnegie Club, a smoke ring’s blow across 56^th Street from Carnegie Hall. My journeys to lunch would begin with the drive to the New Canaan station, then taking a Metro North train four stops, changing in Stamford, and arriving at Grand Central Terminal an hour and fifteen minutes after walking out my front door. I would then exit on to 42^nd Street, stop at the Nat Sherman townhouse a half block from the lions in front of the New York Public Library, and purchase a few items for later in the day. I especially favored choices from Nat Sherman’s silver-banded “Timeless” collection. Sadly, Nat Sherman’s is gone too.

I still haven’t been inside that venerable performance space across the street, but I try to get back to the Carnegie Club anytime I’m in the city to enjoy a smoke and a drink with the expert attention of the bar staff and house manager Scott Asbury. On Saturday evenings for the past 25 years, the Carnegie Club has featured Steve Maglio and the Stan Rubin Orchestra for their wildly popular “Sinatra Saturdays.” The place is always packed, and reservations are required well in advance to garner a table or a seat at the bracket-shaped bar.

Visiting the Carnegie Club reminds me of Sinatra’s connection to Ivy Style, and this was rekindled recently when I read an article in the New York Times under the headline “Gay Talese, Well Suited for the City.” Yes, I read it in an actual newspaper. That’s what some old people still do, along with writing checks, buying stamps, and keeping score while attending a baseball game. His eminence Richard Press has written of his connections with the Chairman of the Board. Talese has too, in his well-known profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, first published in Esquire in April 1966, around the same time as Sinatra was favoring the Ivy Style look. The piece has been reprinted multiple times in various outlets, including a new collection of Talese’s essays titled A Town Without Time: Gay Talese’s New York.

I bought the Talese book after reading about it in the Times and enjoyed the Sinatra piece, which some have claimed is this best celebrity profile ever written. But I was more taken with “The Bridge,” his book on the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge that was reprinted in its entirety in the collection. Talese is still with us, bless his soul, two years into his tenth decade. “To walk through a crowded room with Talese,” the Times author wrote, “is to be accosted by men wanting to talk about suits.” Talese donned a grey wool three-piece suit and a yellow silk tie with blue stripes at a recent holiday party and was “stopped every few steps” by men “eager to discuss the finer points of men’s tailoring.” “When I describe people, I describe the way they look,” said Talese. “Clothes matter – especially when you get old.” Talese revealed that he has almost 60 handmade suits, mostly from the 1950s, and noted that he would “hide behind clothes,” what the Times author viewed as “hiding in plain sight – of curating a sort of flamboyant anonymity.”

“Men don’t dress up in New York anymore,” Talese observed. “You go to a good restaurant, and the women look great. The men dress terribly.” This was Talese quote that rang most true. Part of the allure of our “gentlemen’s lunches” was dressing for the event – suits sometimes, jacket and ties the rest. For the first such gathering at La Grenouille it was during the holidays, I trained to GCT and stopped at J. Press on East 44^th and bought a fully lined, three-button Harris Tweed jacket with flapped front pockets, with an overcheck herringbone pattern of one-inch-wide diagonals, with a loden base color with blue flecks and an orange and gold overcheck. I wore it right out of the store, walked up 5^th Avenue past St. Patrick’s to 52^nd and into the restaurant. No topcoat needed, even on a seasonably brisk mid-December afternoon. This jacket, like most of my other jackets and suits, has at least one black-and-red striped box of Carnegie Club matches in the right front flapped pocket. When we met at 21 Club the next holiday season, I again stopped by J. Press and purchased wool schoolboy mufflers for the gents.

The original Le Veau D’Or, on 60^th Street between Park and Lex, diagonally across from Bloomingdale’s, was a regular haunt in those early-days lunches, and one member of our group who worked in the retail end of the wine and spirits industry was on good terms with Catherine Treboux, who took over the place from her father. Once, Mme. Treboux let us linger after the lunch service ended, and we’d hang out in one of the red leather booths, helping ourselves to the libations at the bar while the kitchen staff prepped for the dinner crowd.

Soon thereafter, Treboux turned the place over to two well-known restauranteurs, who spent several years refitting it until it reopened last year. When a lunchmate and I returned last summer, we were pleased to find that the décor and small bar are still the same, including the black-and-red parquet floor, Art Deco wood-and mirrored finishes, and the notable painting of a slumbering calf tucked into bed. My friend grumbled about the all-organic wine list, but I was more taken aback by a guy across the way, sitting there wearing a dingy strap-back low-profile hat all through the meal, the perfectly awful complement to his faded denim shirt and pants. Though my pal and I were in suits, Talese’s observations were spot on again.

Talese’s new collection also includes “The Kingdoms, the Powers, and the Glories of the New York Times”, another 1966 Esquire profile, this one about the Great Gray Lady and its decades of machinations concerning its publishing and editorial leadership, focusing on the reign of Clifton Daniel, who served as managing editor of the from 1964 to 1969. Talese had worked there for 12 years, quitting in 1965, and cadged the piece’s title from “The Lord’s Prayer.” He later expanded the profile into full-fledged book called The Kingdom and the Power. Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World, released in 1969.

In the ’66 piece, Talese notes that Daniel’s “suits are very Savile Row … his voice a soft, smooth blend of North Carolina, where he was born in a tiny tobacco town, and England, where he came of age as a journalist and squire of fashionable women and was sometimes referred to as the Sheik of Fleet Street.” Daniel came to the Times in 1944, hired away from the Associated Press, and became the protégé of Turner Catledge, a fellow southerner who served as managing editor from 1951 until Daniel took his place.

Talese notes that in 1956, Daniel married Margaret Truman, daughter of former U.S. president Harry S. Truman. The couple settled in Bedford, New York, and Daniel became a commuter. After his approximately one-hour, fifteen-minute ride in each morning, then either a ten-minute walk or taking the Times Square shuttle from Grand Central, Daniel appeared at the Times office at 43^rd and Broadway “having read all the newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and, until recently, Women’s Wear Daily. His secretary – as they were called then – greets him outside his office. She is “an extremely pretty young woman who dresses impeccably,” writes Talese, adding that Daniel “chose her himself, and one is not surprised. ‘I am interested,’ he admits, in appearances,’ and this extends not only to individuals’ grooming or clothes, but also to the manner in which they conduct their private lives. He objects to being described as ‘puritanical,’ indicating that it matters little to him if the whole staff of the New York Times is involved in a vast assortment of pleasurable pursuits, sexual or otherwise; he is concerned, however, with ‘appearances.’”

Talese also notes that when Daniel debarks from the return train each evening, “Margaret is waiting at the station, always parked in the same spot. When she sees him, she honks the horn. He comes over, perfectly pressed, not a hair out of place, and gets into the driver’s seat as she slides over. He kisses her on the cheek. She begins to talk as he starts up the engine of a Chevrolet station wagon. Then he spins the car around, and they begin the drive home – a typical American couple.”

Talese’s retelling brought to mind a story told to me by a prep school classmate of my spouse who had grown up in Darien, the town just south of New Canaan. She recounted that her father, like Clifton Daniel, had made the trek into the city on the train each workday, and every morning he would spy a woman in curlers drive up to the Darien station, pull over, and a man would get out and walk to the platform to catch the train. Then, each evening, after the return train had pulled into the station, her father would spy that same man getting off the train. His wife had pulled up again, but now was dressed and coiffed smartly, with a martini in hand, which she would give to her hubby as he got into the car, and they too sped homeward, perhaps less than a typical American couple, but perhaps something more typical to Darien.

These tales notwithstanding, I can understand why most if not all current day Metro North riders fail to wax poetic about their commutes. I did, however. My rides to Midtown were solely for the pursuit of amusement, and my journeys back home were not an escape from a hard day’s travails but rather a somewhat wistful return from a day where people dressed well to go to fantastic places to eat, drink and smoke as they saw fit in the middle of the workweek and didn’t particularly worry if they missed the 6:09. There was always the 7:03, so there was time for another round.