The British music-hall comedian George Leybourne, born in 1842, came to be known as Champagne Charlie, the titular character from his popular song. As Charlie, he’d fluff his Piccadilly weepers (bushy sideburns) and strut the stage, swilling Moët (contractually, he was allowed to drink nothing else in public), while warbling, “Who’ll come and join me in a spree?” His exuberance for bubbly is being kept alive in the front garden of the High Line Hotel, which inhabits the former General Theological Seminary, in Chelsea. One late-summer evening, patrons in designer sunglasses lazed beneath gas lamps, slurping oysters and sipping Chandon Brut, or Étoile Brut, or an eight-hundred-and-fifty-dollar magnum of Dom Perignon Vintage Blanc ’04 from large coups. (If you buy the apocryphal tale that Marie Antoinette’s breast inspired the glass’s shape, you’d infer that she was a C-cup.) One vertically challenged gentleman worked on a bottle with a blonde flashing a large diamond. He dwelled on his medical maladies: “I woke up and smelled the formaldehyde. It was straight out of the nineteenth century.” A nun wandered into the garden, and was ignored by its occupants. Perhaps they were unaware that “Champagne Charlie” ’s melody was adapted for a Salvation Army hymn—“I am trusting in the cleansing flood. / Bless His name, He sets me free”—but its sentiment they understood: they rode the sparkling flood’s tide into the night. ♦
