John Barlow - Eating Mammals

‘I am an eating specialist,’ he said, and again I hardly knew how earnest or capricious I was to take him, ‘although, if I say so myself, of a rather exclusive kind. Not an attraction, in the normal sense. I do not actually attract people. My performances are entirely private affairs. But perhaps you have seen something of my profession, or heard of it at least?’

I assured him that I had not, shaking my head vigorously.

‘And in the pub, or at the fair, have you never seen men competing to be the fastest with a yard of ale, to the delight of all around? And have you never heard of the great pie-eating competitions, of tripe-swallowing and the like?’

I had to admit that I had.

‘Well,’ he said, turning his palms upwards humbly, ‘every profession has its amateurs, its quaint traditions and its side-street hobbyists. And every profession has also its experts, its virtuosi, its aristocrats. I, if I may be so bold as to say so, am of the latter category: a gentleman eater.’

And thus he began a narrative which took us not only to fine, seaside hotels in the north of England, but across the great oceans, to places and societies which, even in the depths of despair during the war, I had hardly dreamed existed.

Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan left Dublin in 1919 and followed many of his compatriots to the New World. A combination of charm and immense size and strength led him quickly into the public relations departments of New York’s finest bars and restaurants; that is, he became a liveried bouncer. However, he began to make a name for himself not through the grace with which he could remove drunks from the premises, nor the unerring discretion with which he could explain to a troublemaker just why he ought to make his trouble elsewhere, but after the evening’s work was done, whilst eating with his colleagues. Here he showed a talent for food and drink which amazed and frightened all around him. At first they thought he was just a hungry boy from the countryside feasting for the first time on good American food. But it continued, day by day, week by week, the quantities growing steadily. In the early hours, when the last of the customers were slamming taxi doors behind them, the band packing away their instruments, the kitchen would fill up with staff – waitresses, doormen, musicians – all waiting for that boy Mulligan to eat.

Such feats soon got him talked about, and not just below stairs. Before long the fine clientele of the restaurants and hotels where he worked got to hear about him, and wanted to see the greedy Irishman in action. However, the genteel nature of these establishments meant that demonstrations of this kind could take place only behind closed doors. Vaudeville, and more especially the freak-show business, was full of swallowers of all descriptions, and no association with such lower forms of entertainment was desired. So, before he knew exactly what he was getting into, Mulligan was performing nightly for enthusiastic private parties of rich New Yorkers, eager for any novel and diverting spectacle.

In those days he was strictly a quantity man. And his act came immediately after an audience had finished dining. That is to say, it came at the precise moment when, to a tableful of gorged, drunken socialites, the very sight of someone eating was in itself revolting. That such a sight involved almost unbelievable amounts of food merely exacerbated the monstrousness of the performance. To Mulligan it was no more than an extension of dinner, and each evening, after the show was over, he would pat his groaning stomach and shake his head with incomprehension, quite at a loss to explain his growing celebrity. Night after night it went on: a basket of fried chicken, a bottle of champagne, a plateful of sausage, a quart of beer, two dozen lamb chops, a trifle (‘a mere trifle!’ as the script went) followed, as if to confound the disbelievers, by another, identical trifle … The act came to its climax when, plucking a single rose from a vase, Mulligan made as if to present it to the most glamorous woman in the party and then, feigning to prick himself, would say: ‘Why, this is a dangerous weapon! I better take care of it!’ With which he would promptly gobble down the flower together with stalk (which he had de-thorned earlier), to the amazement of the city’s finest.

One evening, after a particularly successful show in which he had performed a routine entitled Americana (forty-eight hot dogs, one for each star; thirteen slices of apple pie, one for each stripe; twenty-eight cups of punch, one for each president; and a brandy for Lincoln), he was approached by a thin, fragile man who spoke in a strange accent, and who had the eyes of someone who expects yes for an answer. Laden with a stomach full of borrowed patriotism, yet happy with his performance, Michael listened with great interest to the proposal: Paris, twenty dollars a week, more varied work …

He was soon on a steamer to France, earning enough money through drinking competitions in the lower-deck bars that when he disembarked in Europe, he had more than two hundred dollars in his pocket, which he spent immediately on fine suits of tweed and velvet.

On arrival at his new place of employment – another unmentionable hotel, I’m afraid, since it is still there, almost unchanged they say, although of course I have never set foot in the place – he found a rather different kind of job awaited him. Amid the grand opulence of banqueting halls, their walls covered in immense oil canvases and gilt-framed mirrors, and occasionally in the private suites of the hotel’s more extravagant guests, he no longer ate his way through a fixed menu, but rather devoured whatsoever was requested of him. This, then, was the meaning of more varied work.

‘I was the greatest!’ cried Mulligan from his armchair, pounding his chest with a cannonball fist and laughing out loud. ‘The act was pure theatre, pure spectacle. After dessert was well under way, I would arrive and sit at a place laid for me at the table, this place having remained ominously and threateningly vacated throughout the dinner itself. There I would assume a pose of impervious indifference to those around me, who, I should say, often included not only crown princes, sheikhs and ambassadors, but also the shrieking, guffawing minor nobility of any number of European states, not to mention the greatest actresses of the Parisian stage, to whom clung more often than not one or another chuckling millionaire. Yet, before my steely, unforgiving expression (in addition to my size), these diners usually appeared a touch intimidated, with those nearest to me the most humbled.

‘And here we worked an excellent trick. The story went that I had been rescued from deepest rural Ireland (my red hair, which in those days I wore long, added zest to this detail), where I had been brought up almost in the wild by my grandmother. Moreover, I was profoundly deaf, and could communicate only through a strange language involving tapping one’s fingers into another’s palm, a language known only to my (now deceased) grandmother and the idealistic Frenchman who had brought me to France on the death of my grandma. This man had become my trusty assistant – the young lad was really an out-of-work actor from the provinces, so out-of-work, indeed, that this was his first job in Paris – and each night he acted as interpreter for Le Grand Michael Mulligan.

‘“Ladies and gentlemen,” he would announce after my silent presence had generated its usual disquiet, “Monsieur Mulligan hopes that you have dined well, and will be pleased to consider your suggestions for his own dinner this evening.”

‘Now, a curious thing is that the powerful and highly placed citizens on this earth are frequently the most childlike. Thus, whereas these guests were prone to exaggerated, uncontrolled enthusiasm once they had become excited, it was not unusual at the initial stages of my act to encounter a nervous silence. Eventually, someone, an inebriated eldest son over from England for the chorus girls, or a fat German banker too pompous and drunk to know timidity, would shout out, “A sardine!” to great and relieved hilarity all round. My assistant would tap the message into my palm. In return, Le Grand Michael Mulligan would consider the request solemnly until the laughter had subsided, and would either give a controlled, deliberate nod, in which case the specified item was called for, or would decline with a slow shake of the head, glowering in the direction of whoever had made so contemptible a suggestion.