The Martini was born at least a century ago, but its Golden Age begins in the twentieth century. As early as 1904, O. Henry mentions the Martini in The Gentle Grafter, a comic tale in which Parley-voo Pickens and his partner, Caligula Polk, kidnap the wealthiest citizen of Mountain Valley, Georgia, and decide to treat him royally with a fancy meal: "So at twelve o'clock we had a hot lunch ready that looked like a banquet on a Mississippi river steamboat. We spread it on top of two or three big boxes, opened two quarts of the red wine, set the olives and a canned oyster cocktail and a ready-made Martini by the colonel's plate, and called him to grub." This episode tells us two things: Not only is the Martini so well-known at the dawn of the century that O. Henry can mention it without explanation, but a liquor company--in typical American fashion--has already marketed a ready-made version. Cocktails, particularly those made with gin, were increasingly popular. The Martini's speedy ascent, begun during World War I, stalled during the first days of Prohibition and then, ironically, accelerated. But on January 16, 1920, thirty-six states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the selling of alcoholic beverages was forbidden by law. Bars and taverns from coast to coast closed their doors, but many reopened elsewhere as speakeasies. Bootleggers found it easier to make drinkable gin than whiskey, and bathtub gin became the liquid currency of the underworld. "Some speakeasies are disguised behind florists' shops, or behind undertakers' coffins," reported a french observer in New York. "I know one, right on Broadway, which is entered through an imitation telephone box." The 21 Club, then known as Jack and Charlie's , had a trick to beat a police raid: an emergency button would flip the bottles on the bar shelf down a chute to the basement. Prohibition ruined the restaurant business in cities, and posh establishments such as New York's Delmonico's, which depended on wines and champagne, soon went out of business. And it changed the way Americans drank. While across the country general liquor consumption was down, city dwellers drank more per capita, and the trend was towards a mass binge on hard liquor. Spanish surrealist film maker Luis Bunuel--an ardent Martini drinker--wrote in his 1982 memoir: My Last Sigh; I never drank so much in my life as the time I spent five months in the United States during Prohibition. I had a two-fingered bootlegger friend in Los Angeles who taught me that the way to tell real gin from ersatz was to shake the bottle in a certain way. Real gin, he assured me, bubbles. It was a time when you could get your whiskey in the local pharmacy with a prescription, and your wine in a coffee cup when you went to the right restaurant...Prohibition was clearly one of the more nonsensical ideas of the century. Americans got fabulously drunk, although with repeal they seem to have learned to drink more intelligently." Until Prohibition ended in 1934, Americans had little access to high-proof, highly fragrant gins, but the cheap stuff was easy to make. "The gin is aged about the length of time it takes to get from the bathroom where it is made to the front porch where the cocktail party is in progress," claimed one bar book. So bartenders disguised bathtub gin with a "civilizing" dose of vermouth in a one-to-two ratio. The Martini cocktail was sipped from a small chilled glass with a twist of lemon. Since Prohibition gin wasn't of the best quality, new cocktails were invented to mask the crude taste--especially for the ladies. A 1934 Martini & Rossi advertisement in Vanity Fair noted, "They're disappearing fast, thank goodness--those vicious liquid heartburns. People are going back to civilized cocktails--Martinis..." After signing the act repealing Prohibition, Franklin Roosevelt mixed the first legal Martini in the White House. Cocktails moved from the speakeasy to the legal bar and, finally to the living room, where, along with the radio, the cocktail hour became an American institution. Used with the permission of Chronicle Books, San Francisco. Copyright 1995.