![]() ![]() As if all this weren’t astonishing enough, he had on his beautiful café attire, only now bits of potato peel flecked his lapels, and sometimes, when he bowed his head low over an operation, sweat from his brow coursed its way down the ridge of his nose and dripped onto the cuffs of his Turnbull & Asser shirt. After three or four minutes-not before-he announced the price of his “machine,” as he called it, produced a wad of bills from his left coat pocket, and began dealing peelers as fast as he could to the outstretched hands flapping money in his face. Meanwhile, he kept up a constant patter of inspired stretchers and persiflage belted out at the top of his lungs in a scratchy, theatrical Cockney singsong. The table and his campstool were so low to the ground that he worked from a perpetual crouch, like a catcher. A long slab of Lucite served as his worktable, which rested on storage bins filled with all his produce. He sat on a campstool, peeler in hand, and performed all manner of surgical wonders on carrots, zucchini, and Idaho potatoes. While walking the streets in the months that followed, some of the probers, who may have still doubted him, came upon Joe in the middle of a spiel with a crowd gathered around him at some busy corner. The probers had a good chuckle over that. If no one was brave enough to ask him where he lived, quite a few people asked him what he did for a living. The Café Pierre was way off about Joe, or so it decided after some probing. He looked so distinguished and was so free with the bubbly that the Café Pierre crowd, Landis included, at first had him pegged as one of the “owners”-the tycoons who actually live at the Pierre in stupendously high-end co-op apartments. The clothes went well with his English accent and late-period Sean Connery salt-and-pepper beard. On most nights he casually ordered a bottle, which always appeared with two champagne glasses-one for himself, the other for Landis.Įven by the standards of café society, Joe cut a noticeably soigné figure in his classic, British-made Chester Barrie suits and bold shirts and ties from Turnbull & Asser. He drank only champagne, and never alone. ![]() Joe was a five-nights-a-week man as well, always seated at the same round table with a front view of the baby grand and a back view of Landis. ![]() Joe liked the crowd at the Café Pierre, but the real draw for him was Kathleen Landis, the dimpled, piano-playing house chanteuse who still entertains there five nights a week. In the early 90s a man named Joe Ades began showing up in the bar at the Pierre, Manhattan’s famously posh hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street. ![]()
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