The Ritz of the Bayou

  ALSO BY NANCY LEMANN

  Lives of the Saints

  Sportsman’s Paradise

  The Fiery Pantheon

  Malaise

  The Oyster Diaries

  Copyright © 2026

  by Nancy Lemann

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Design Lead: Meg Reid

  Hub City Editor: Katherine Webb-Hehn

  Cover Design: Luke Bird

  Author Photo © Eliza Grace Clein

  Copy Editor: Iza Wojciechowska

  Managing Editor: Kate McMullen

  Sales and Marketing Manager: Julie Jarema

  First published in 1987 by Knopf

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  First Edition | Printed in the USA

  HUB CITY PRESS

  153 N. Spring Street

  Spartanburg, SC 29306

  864.577.9349 | www.hubcity.org

  You have it or you haven’t it,

  like health or brown eyes

  or honor

  or a baritone voice.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  by James Wolcott

  Welcome back, old friend. Of all of Nancy Lemann’s unjustly neglected books, The Ritz of the Bayou, first published in 1987, has the unjustliest. Secondhand copies have long been scarce and even some of the most devoted Lemann drop kids are only hazily aware of its existence, or consider it an outlier in her oeuvre, a fluky interlude, like Ann Beattie’s meditation on Pat Nixon that left everyone going what, huh? Writers do wander off sometimes, get lost in the reeds. This is not one of those misbegotten turns. Lavishly subtitled, like some 18th century picaresque novel, “The New Orleans adventures of a young novelist covering the trials of the Governor of Louisiana, with digressions on smoldering nightclubs, jazz-crazed bars, and other aspects of life in the tropic zone,” The Ritz of the Bayou possesses all of the signature traits of Lemann’s fiction—the rueful humor and wry asides, the sentences that unfurl like scarves from a magician’s sleeve, the damp moss of history underfoot in the present, the faded gallantry and frayed collars of good manners—with a larger probe of social anatomy and institutional drift.

  The Ritz of the Bayou began as an assignment from Vanity Fair. I can testify that it had a difficult gestation, as did many Vanity Fair articles in those tremulous times. Under its new editor Tina Brown the magazine was still securing its voice and stride after a bumpy launch. A monthly columnist in its pages (then fragrantly aroma’d from perfume-strip inserts), I happened to be in Tina’s office, that humming beehive of creative tension, when the conversation turned to the dispatch Nancy Lemann had just filed about the trial of Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, which Nancy, a child of New Orleans, was covering. Tina was dissatisfied—borderline exasperated—with the copy, and when Tina was dissatisfied, the mice hid for cover. Nowhere in the article, Tina complained, did Nancy specify what the trial was about, what the actual charges were, and what the criminal penalties might be; it was all mood, seance atmosphere, and sketch artistry, the facts of the case nowhere to be found. This was not journalism as it was preached in the chapels of Conde Nast. “I’ll talk to Nancy and get her to work all this in up front,” said Pat Towers, Nancy’s sainted editor. In Towers’s comment, I caught an echo of something I had once heard Nancy sigh aloud about an editor’s suggestions regarding her latest novel manuscript, primarily its lack of story: “I guess I’ll have to go back and put in some plot.” Plot, such a chore. But of course you can’t retroactively implant a plot into a body of fiction as if installing a new transmission. That’s not how fiction works. More importantly, that’s not how Nancy works.

  Beginning with her debut novel, Lives of the Saints (1985), Lemann has excelled as a dappled Impressionist, working with a small cast of characters and never trying to force action or squeeze themes out of the material. Life eddies along at its own sweet leisure while numerous psyches begin to unravel, trying to maintain a dignified front. Ennui is no excuse for poor manners. No scene in a Lemann narrative seems complete without several characters in various stages of disrepair or subtle agitation engaged in the sort of dialogue that vines around itself. Lives of the Saints, Sportsman’s Paradise, The Fiery Pantheon, Malaise (such a title, so Françoise Sagan)—they’re like pre-mumblecore movies with a more interesting ensemble of neurotics and a shapelier sense of comedy, garlanded with recurring phrases that become melodic refrains. Although Nancy was a protégée of Gordon Lish, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Walker Percy, a heady triad of influences and personality-pluses that might have easily overloaded her sensibility, Lemann’s literary voice from the outset was assuredly, distinctively hers, a signature sound and rhythm that have found no imitators. She’s a mixologist of mood and ardor. In temperament and sensibility, Lemann seems closer to F. Scott Fitzgerald than any of her mentors, a Scott and Zelda rolled into one, suffused with a longing for a lost glamour and infused with a steady intake of carbonation, cigarettes, and ill-advised kisses. Unlike Scott and Zelda on a spree, Nancy and her autobiographical stand-ins are built for comfort rather than luxury, bohemian romantics with a fondness for familiar haunts and a taste for the shabby-genteel.

  The Ritz of the Bayou is no different, indeed even more of a quest for truth and beauty in whatever bar or backwater they’ve taken refuge in. Its publication a beau geste by Knopf editor and literary svengali Gordon Lish, this fugue performance of personal reporting on a complicated trial with a largely obscure cast of lawyers, reporters, local notorieties, and assorted eccentrics had no prayer of commercial success. Lish, bless his ornery soul, had no interest in midwifing bestsellers, only in publishing writing that lit up his synapses. The Ritz of the Bayou did that and today it still pulses with afterlife and aquamarine afterglow. For the finished book, Nancy included all of the factual necessities lacking in her original Vanity Fair draft, but it isn’t as journalism that the book deserves better than it got and gets. It’s a true-life movie that takes the reader along for the mazy ride. It reveals Nancy Lemann as an unrivaled, unlicensed detective in the art of “reading the room,” the roving mistress of vibes. As soon as our correspondent takes her first gander at the courtroom in the Edwards case, she knows she is where she is destined to be. “My heart was back in business when I saw all that human frailty.” Like the hedonistic, easy-goes-it governor in the defendant’s chair, she is loath to moralize and scold, musing, “Politics is not the place to look for saints. It’s not exactly the blue vault of heaven there, in politics.” Some of her other deadpan ironies are positively Murray Kempton-ish: “The Prosecutor was not winning when he moralized about the Governor, who is known for gambling, womanizing, and risque bon mots, for people hold few things as dear as those.”

  As the trial drags on, further delayed by the latest hurricane to barge in, entropy and brain fatigue take hold and morale unravels: “The jurors were beginning to fall to pieces.” Following a mistrial, the Governor is retried, and the second jury pool is an even sorrier lot than the first (“The excuses were more lame than ever… ‘I’m constipated,’” etc.). But somehow the judicial process proceeds on its rickety course, and the Governor is acquitted, a strangely anticlimactic result, but somehow fitting for the endless soap opera that was (is?) Louisiana corruption, where a new episode always awaits. Having no further vibes to harvest on this expedition, Nancy Lemann, Girl Reporter, bids a weary Blanche DuBois adieu, “for my days in politics are over.” Politics is simply no place for dreamers and nonconformists but it is also too important to be left to the pundits, the electoral handicappers, and the Beltway schmoozers climbing up each others’ balconies. We need the novelist’s perspective and Nancy Lemann’s perspective is like nobody else’s, tender and humanist without being corny. It has its own special kick. You read Ritz as if ignoring the rain while sipping on the perfect gin martini.

  –J.W., 2026

  THE RITZ OF THE BAYOU

  1.

  Baton Rouge, 1985

  The capitol is found among palmetto groves and sweltering lawns in Baton Rouge, across a bayou from the Governor’s Mansion. There is some West Indian and Congo architecture, with columns and banana trees, in the neighborhood known as Spanish Town, next to that known as Beauregard Town, near the capitol. There are the humble residential neighborhoods, and the green South in the tropic heat, downtrodden and despairing, and then the opulence along the lakes and bayous, among the palmetto groves.

  In the rotunda of the capitol there is a large elevator. FOR THE GOVERNOR ONLY is written in gold letters decorated with pelicans and flamingos in gold gilt. The bullet holes from the assassination of Huey Long are in the walls outside of the office of the Speaker of the House. Palm fronds are painted on the ceiling. The Se
nators are smoking cigars, in the sweltering capitol, in a night session of the legislature, and the newspapermen and ornate old columnists stand in the press section, while the same sorrows abound.

  On the fourth floor of the capitol is the Governor’s Office and the Press Room, with life-sized portraits of Napoleon and Iberville. Black maids and butlers are everywhere. In the basement the reporters have offices, a room for each paper, the Times-Picayune, the Alexandria Town Talk, the AP wire, etc. The Governor of course is not in his office or in the legislature, but across the bayou in the mansion, where he prefers to conduct business.

  It was in the legislature that Earl Long had his first public breakdown, in the House, where he made a rambling incoherent speech, until the editor of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate led the Governor away from the podium; and two days later, at the mansion, they finally put him away.

  “Sweetheart, give me Rewrite,” said the reporter into the telephone. “He’s over the edge again.”

  “How old are you, honey?” said the man. Then the man spilled a glass of bourbon on me. It was on the train from New York to New Orleans, the Southern Crescent. The man started coming apart at the seams in Montgomery, and the rest of Alabama somehow seemed to make it worse. “I just want to be somebody’s hero,” said the man.

  At the risk of being repetitious, I will say that the man seemed to be falling apart. In the North, the mood among the passengers was strictly business, showing signs of industry and progress; but once we passed the capital and went through green Virginia, a sort of feverish alcoholic atmosphere became the norm, and everyone seemed to go into crisis. Styles of dress became eccentric and unkempt, as did modes of behavior, particularly in the club car, which was extremely active at all hours once we crossed the Mason-Dixon line. Throughout the afternoon, oddly enough, a black woman was singing a sort of jazz love song to a diminutive white man with a black patch over one eye. It was extremely odd, and later developed into a sort of riot. I would characterize the atmosphere as smoldering. From the Carolinas through to Mississippi. Someone had a radio playing old records from Memphis, and only in the South would there be that crazy kind of jazz, the instruments in languid unison, such old-time saxophones and jazz, Mississippi and dilapidated bars along the Gulf Coast, downtrodden and remote, with its unlikely glamour.

  But one thing you know—when you are in the South, approaching your hometown—is that your ticker’s back in business. This may have strange effects. Take the man with the bourbon, for instance.

  The man was maybe forty-four years old. He was wearing a seersucker suit, somewhat shabby, but nevertheless giving him a mild, conservative demeanor. The man had what we call a love of the underdog, which is something that one also has if one loves the South. The reason why I knew the man had a love of the underdog was because it turned out he was pasting people back together all over the train, even though formerly it seemed it was he who was in the worst shape. He had a heart like an artichoke, as the Creoles used to say, a leaf for everyone. Trouble was not a stranger to the man. He was used to stormy weather.

  The atmosphere was still smoldering. “I just want to sit here in the dark with you,” said the man with the bourbon. “You some kind of good-looking gal,” he drawled. Then he went to get more bourbon. “My little shrimp remoulade,” he called me.

  The black woman who sang the jazz song came over to my seat, bearing the man in the seersucker suit’s tie. “Will you give this to my precious baby doll?” she said. I said I surely would; and yet, they both got off in Hattiesburg.

  So from Hattiesburg to New Orleans, what few remained on the sweltering train sank into a more elegiac mode as we crossed Lake Pontchartrain to the tropic zone.

  I went to the legislature, to the sweltering capitol in the pouring rain, listening to the born-again Christian radio station. “You’re an idiot, mister,” says the preacher to his imaginary foe, with whom he argues about his pet peeves: psychologists, modern-art critics, and liberals. “They may say I’m a hayseed. They may say I’m a hick. But why are all psychologists crazy?”

  The highway to Baton Rouge goes along Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas, green as in the tropics, shades of green and a grey-blue sky, shrimp trawlers and pleasure boats sweltering in the heat. Then one crosses a long swamp with dead twisted tree trunks growing out of it, into a glittering cobalt blue, if the sky is sunny, with green marshes at the side.

  The Senators are smoking cigars, with their Southern names like B. B. Sixty Rayburn, Lala Lalonde, Shady Wall, etc., standing up to make their drawling speeches, eyeing the pages, reading the newspapers, talking on the telephones attached to their ornate carved desks. So the girl reporter takes her place beneath the palm fronds painted on the ceiling, among the Senators smoking cigars.

  It was a rainy night. There was a tropic storm. Two reporters sat at the bar of the Lafayette Hotel, hoping the Governor’s press agent would come down. One floor of the hotel was occupied by the Governor’s lawyers; another floor by reporters. The former’s attitude to the latter was always, of course, somewhat guarded and strange; but at the cocktail hour one was likely to see them together, at what I could call somewhat ornate meetings.

  “The Governor is coming in,” said someone on the stairs, and so the word was whispered through the room—then he came in, with his bodyguard, aide, press agent, friend, etc., and entire entourage, a hushed silence surrounding him, everyone leaning across to hear his jokes and hang on his every word.

  The two reporters, a Southerner and a Yankee, as it happened, got a story and went to the Press Room to file. A pathetic Mardi Gras parade was going down Camp Street, with a Brazilian theme. Then they went to the voting polls in the Black Pearl, quite a sorry sight, little shacks in a tropic town.

  One was a Yankee and the other a Southerner, and equally so, one was a romantic masquerading as a cynic, and the other was the reverse.

  The thing I love about New Orleans is that it is always deserted. This especially after being in New York. If there’s one thing we don’t have in New Orleans, it’s hubbub. In New York you wait in long lines to go to a movie. In New Orleans you and your date are the only ones in the theater—except for one elderly couple from Metairie, maybe. The restaurant at the Lafayette Hotel—deserted. The post office—lines? are you kidding?—deserted. Julia Street—deserted. And when in New York you find yourself trapped on a Friday evening between five and seven wondering if the step should actually be taken of going over to Grand Central to wait in a huge mob to find a cab, in New Orleans at that hour there wouldn’t be another person on the street, except for one fellow in a seersucker suit. He will be walking slowly down Gravier Street, smoking a cigar. This is peace. Slow time.

  Peace is not a thing that can be easily found. I know a great man who says it is not to be found at all. It’s just not in the bargain, he says. But I found it in brief terms, in my New Orleans, when it was balmy and eighty-two degrees and everything was green, among the eccentric palms. After these years in New York it was sweet to return, at the end of August, but I did not know that I would remain there, at the trial and the legislature, for almost one whole year. You spend a year inside a court of law, and it has various effects, and is not easily forgotten.

  The trial of the Governor, for racketeering, fraud, and bribery, was conducted in a New Orleans courtroom by a crowd of drawling white-haired gents. It was there that I obtained some education of the world, of politics and men and morals. One deception can be traded for another, greatness and betrayal lie beside each other closely intertwined. The truth, in the end, I think, is not always to be found in a courtroom, but a great deal of human frailty is. There is a lot of human frailty floating around.

  There is so much human frailty floating around that it is a dramatic thing to see, for better and for worse, and I have to say that there, among the human frailty, I found something I had ceased to expect, and it was written in dramatic script, when otherwise, when it was over, life was written in small print. It is not that I advocate human frailty, but I had never seen so much of it, all at once, and it was a sort of breathtaking spectacle.