Love to Jackie: At a luncheon
at Moose's on November 9, 2003, Barnaby Conrad
confirmed what I had suspected. The matador drawing in this copy of Name
Dropping - which turned up at the Acorn Bookstore on Polk Street - was drawn
by the author for Jackie Onassis. |
Author, artist,
and raconteur Barnaby Conrad is the founding director of the Santa
Barbara Writers' Conference and the author of more than 27 books including
Tahiti, La Fiesta Brava, Gates of Fear, San Francisco, Dangerfield, How
to Fight a Bull, Famous Last Words, Hemingway's Spain, Learning to Write
Fiction from the Masters and The World of Herb Caen.
The native San Franciscan is also a former vice consul to Spain, amateur
bullfighter, art teacher, and onetime secretary to novelist Sinclair Lewis.
He studied art at the Academie Julien in Paris and named his former North
Beach night spot after his successful 1952 novel, Matador. His 1994 memoir
Name Dropping: Tales from My Barbary Coast Saloon is, as the title suggests,
a collection of gossip and stories from El
Matador, which
was located at 492 Broadway and known by regulars as "the Mat." From the
book: "The night Ava Gardner first came into El Matador she was sober and
gorgeous. But two hours later she had snatched a bullfighter's hat off the
wall and was doing a torrid, if lurching, flamenco solo on the bar, her
skirt hiked up around her waist, while her anonymous escort looked pained
and the customers applauded." Gardner's inelegant turn notwithstanding,
The Mat set a standard for elegant socializing in North Beach the likes
of which has not been seen since the 1950s. Conrad, who founded the Santa
Barbara Writers' Conference in 1972, is also the artist of a portrait
of Bing Crosby that graces the receiving room of the Crosby mansion
in Hillsborough. |