Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, I like a very dry gin martini on the rocks with lemon peel before dinner. I didn’t grow up drinking wines at dinner or beer in college. When I got to New York I was the only woman in town who sat at a bar drinking water with advertising clients. I looked around at the ladies in hats with cigarette holders and I studied movies and it seemed to me that martinis were the height of sophistication. I decided to love them. It took me a long time to fall in love, three or four years, and nothing else tempted me.

By the time I could drink a whole martini without consequences I had also learned to like a good glass of wine with dinner. And that is it for me – no matter what the season. I marvel at the amount of beer men can drink, even very fit fellows, and at the vodka cocktails my girlfriends can drink and still dance in those skyscraper heels they are all wearing. I like danger but not liquid danger. Except once in a very long while, with just the right person, on a ravishing Italian night, when I am in the mood to be madly in love, I like a little Grappa. Absinth will do. I like what they do to my conversation, to my style.

Well, I live in the tropics and New Orleans is — allegedly — where the cocktail was invented, so it is hard to pin favorites down. BUT:

I love a Pimm’s Cup, which is the house specialty at the Napoleon House here in the French Quarter. (The bar is so named because the original owner offered it as a refuge to the exiled Napoleon in 1821. He died before he could make it, but the place is still a sort of shrine to him. What no one can explain is the irony of the fact that a British drink is featured here since Napoleon literally met his Waterloo at the hands of a British commander. But it makes drinking them slightly more interesting.) The Napoleon House is remarkably cool, even in summer, which I think has a lot to do with its crumbling plaster walls and high, high ceilings, and the fans that push the air around between the wall of French doors and the courtyard. Anyway, the place is utterly timeless and it is heaven to drop in for a refreshing Pimm’s, which I do anytime I’m in the neighborhood.

I discovered a Pimm’s Royale in Paris at the Ritz Bar, where I repaired after abandoning my almost husband on our sort of honeymoon. I had called off the marriage at rather the last minute, and we already had this elaborate trip to France all paid for and planned, and as the man in question was in a bit of denial he asked me if I would still take the trip, and since I stupidly didn’t want to hurt him further, I said yes. So by the time we had made it through Paris and Lyon I was slightly losing my mind. I called my good friend Andre Leon Talley and he wisely told me, "Get your lily-white ass on the fast train" back to Paris, and to meet him at the Ritz Bar at 5:30. Well, he was late, and I had one Pimm’s Royale, which is topped with Brut champagne rather than lemonade, and garnished with the classic cucumber, but also orange and mint and a brandied cherry. So I finished one and ate the cherry and it felt like the back of my brain was sort of taking off and I thought I had better only have one more of those. But then Andre arrived and we drank them for many more hours and all sorts of people dropped in at our table, from Arlene Dahl to Madonna’s bodyguards (she was staying in the hotel). It was totally wild and so much fun and cost more than any other bar bill I have ever paid since, but it was worth it. By the time the would-be husband arrived with his sister, I was happy to see him again. The hangover the next day, on the other hand, was possibly the worst I have ever had, but the Ritz is not a bad place to be hungover, as they bring lots of dry toast and broth and fizzy water and tomato juice on vast silver trays.

I also love:
Gin and Tonics — there’s another place in the French Quarter called Bar Tonique, which makes its own tonic and it is divine. Commercial tonic water in this country has gotten ever sweeter and more awful and when I drink this stuff, I imagine it might taste like the first gin and tonic in India. It also makes me feel as though I might actually be keeping malaria at bay — though that would take more than even I could put away.
Mojitos, plain; really icy lime daiquiris; a Hemingway daiquiri, which has a bit of grapefruit and maraschino in it. I get lots of those in New Orleans (the mojitos at the Bridge Lounge are especially great) as the city was once Cuba’s No. 1 trading partner. I also drank plenty of them when I spent time in Havana several years ago. The place was grim and depressing and operatic and amazing, and a bit of rum at the end of the day definitely helped take the edge off. There was also this drink whose name I can’t remember — if i ever knew it — but an old guy with a little cart would come into this outdoor terrace bar every afternoon, and by your table he would put a stalk of sugar cane into this apparatus he had, with a glass beneath it, and when he turned the crank, pure sugar cane juice would come out. Then he’d add ice and light Havana Club rum. Well, it felt like what I imagine heroin feels like rushing through your veins, between the sugar rush and the healthy dose of rum. So fabulous. I need to find one of those little carts — we have plenty of sugar cane down here.

Last but not least, a really ice-cold beer in the hot sun. When my friend McGee and I went on safari in Tanzania and Kenya, we were always the first to the ice chest for a cold Tusker as we made our way through the game parks toward the end of the day. We had spent our youth on dusty Mississippi Delta back roads doing the same thing (though the beer was usually Miller High Life or Bud) and it felt like home.

Hmmm — Margarita, foamy and thick: hangover. Campari Soda, bitter and bright: mini hangover. Pimm’s cup, with fronds of mint and apple and orange slices: massive hangover. I learned early on that I don’t really like alcohol. So a beer is my maximum. An American beer drunk from a can in the garden of the Posada Semeruco, Choroni, Venezuela, on my last day of shooting last month. Brenda and Pete and Felix and Isabel sitting in thick white cotton hammocks, between giant banana plant leaves and Bromeliads and darting little lizards. Heaven.