The Melting Boîte
During its run, Claude’s embodied Santa Fe’s nighttime counterculture
Some places seem to have more history than others. New Mexicans like to brag there’s more history here than in other Western states, and Santa Feans can get pretty snooty when it comes to their local lore versus that of the rest of the state. Homing in further, Canyon Road, after the Plaza, probably has as much to boast of historically as anywhere in the City Different—or if not historically, then at least in terms of provenance.
Take 656 Canyon, for instance. Who knows what may have transpired on that plot of land over the many millennia prior to the arrival of the Europeans, before the Spanish settlers of the 1600s began hauling wood down the path that led from the Sangre de Cristos and into town? It no doubt saw plenty of activity between then and the 1900s, and enjoyed some recognition, too, between World War I and 1951, the period when the Roybal family operated their grocery store there. But between 1951, the year El Camino del Cañon became Canyon Road, and roughly 1955, 656 sat empty and derelict. Unwanted. The road still dirt, two-way, with hardly a gallery to be found. There were still artists here and there—leftovers from that initial art-colonizing phase of the 1910s and ’20s, when Gerald Cassidy and Randall Davey moved in. But Canyon was quiet, rather unspectacular.
Claude François James would change all that. Not that she in any way made Canyon what it is today (the influx of galleries started that process in the early ’80s), just that she set a sort of historical precedent when, in 1956, this Nice, France–born daughter of a Frenchwoman and an American New York Times editor, a onetime Newsweek stringer, New Mexican reporter, and unabashed lesbian who later tended bar barefoot, sang French sailor songs, rolled her own cigarettes, and bred corgis, forever branded 656 Canyon into Santa Fe’s historical timeline.
It didn’t happen immediately, and probably not intentionally. If anything, that’s why Claude’s, as that spot on 656 continued to be known even when others tried to rename it (the Mousetrap, Pisces Moon), is unique: Its ongoing, ever-evolving mélange of high-society types and policitos and cowboys and hippies and artists and locals and celebrities and motorcycle toughs and gays and mountain men came about organically. James arrived, but she didn’t try to be someone she wasn’t, nor did she try to make Claude’s into something she didn’t want it to be; she simply ran her place the way she wanted, all the while being herself, and so others responded in kind: People just wanting to be themselves gravitated to it as if it were some sort of mecca. Or maybe it was just the booze that brought them in droves. (Claude’s had a liquor license when few other eateries in town did.) Whatever brought them, they lasted until neighbors essentially shut the place down 16 years later, in 1972.
Enamored of Santa Fe while passing through on a trip from Washington, D.C., out West, James stayed. While singing along to some French chansons at a party one night, she so impressed one of the couples there that they asked her to manage their restaurant. James agreed, and her mother, an agent in Hollywood, later bought them out.
Claude’s, in its initial incarnation, was elegant—with wrought-iron grillework, French cuisine, steaks and seafood, a
coatroom reserved especially for the guests’ mink and sable furs (and a guard to watch over them), and, beginning when the Opera opened in 1957, a horse-drawn carriage (hired by James) to bring patrons up from the Plaza. The Mobil Guide gave Claude’s a triple-star rating, Robert Kennedy and his wife ate there, Greer Garson ate there, and so, too, did Richard Bradford, author of Red Sky at Morning, and his first wife. It was all quite romantic and glamorous.
Gradually, though, the glamour and the romance faded, as James emphasized drinking and the scene over the dining. By 1961, Claude’s had become a lesbian hangout (even appearing in the Gay Bars in America directory), before morphing again. “It was a laissez-faire kind of honky-tonk,” recounts Cheryl Scott, co-owner of the Silver Sun gallery, which has been in Claude’s old spot since 1980 and owned by her and her two partners since 1988. “You could hang out all day on a single drink.”
The other key spot back then, the daylight yin to the nighttime yang of Claude’s, was a coffeehouse called The Three Cities of Spain, where Geronimo’s is now. Three Cities offered theater, art, and movies, and a very literary scene; its owners, David Munn and Bob Garrison, were the social arbiters of Santa Fe’s cultural happenings.
“Squarely built, pug-faced, sour, and outspoken.” This, according to artist Eli Levin (now known as Jo Basiste), in his book Santa Fe Bohemia, was James, circa 1964 (a down period for her and the bar, during which time Levin worked as James’s houseboy). “That’s when it all changed,” says Basiste, now 71, “when the bohemians and the hippies came in. Then it got wild.”
James, still a character though not such a fixture anymore, ceded her management duties to others, preferring to lie around in bed with her Yorkies and Welsh corgis (at one point, she also ran a pet-grooming shop, the Clip Joint, in one of Claude’s back rooms) up on Apodaca Hill. Somebody painted a zodiac on one of the walls, a disco ball went up, bands came in, the hippies decamped, and regulars and workers with names like Tarzan and Sunshine boozed it up and got high with bikers, cowboys, locals, artists, and freaks, along with Governor Dave Cargo and a former New York Playboy Bunny, who changed her name to Sparkle Plenty (and ran for the U.S. Senate under that name in 1972). “It was a big, loose confederation of people who knew each other,” says former Claude’s doorman Jon Knudsen, now a 66-year-old retired Albuquerque elementary schoolteacher. “It was like Cheers—people there were happy to see each other.”
“I’d never seen anyplace like it,” remembers George Bullfrog, one of the Last Mile Ramblers, who played regularly at Claude’s after moving to Santa Fe in 1971 (then later to Cerrillos). “It was packed every night with hippies being free and getting loaded.”
But without James’s strong presence, Claude’s made an already rough neighborhood (yes, Canyon Road used to be pretty dicey) downright scary. “If I’d worked in Claude’s any longer I wouldn’t’ve lived,” says Knudsen, who fell in love and moved to Albuquerque in 1970. “There were a lot of fights up there and it got pretty dangerous at times. It would take the police 45 minutes to an hour to respond to a call. But Claude’s wasn’t even the most dangerous place. That was this other place up the road, the Canyon Road Bar. It was about the size of someone’s living room. People said they’d perform surgery there every Friday and Saturday night.”
Claude’s wasn’t that much safer. Gunfire got to be pretty normal, which is how the floors and ceilings ended up with so many bullet holes. In fact, look closely at Silver Sun’s front window and you’ll see a bullet hole still there. By 1972, the authorities, after many complaints from the bar’s neighbors, shut down Claude’s for good. Canyon Road slowly gentrified. The property taxes went up and private homes were turned into galleries, which begat more galleries.
“Some people cleaned up their act and became rich selling conchas to the tourists,” laughs Bullfrog, now 61. “But those days are pretty much gone, and all those kinds of bars are gone, too—the Golden Inn in Golden, the Thunderbird in Placitas.” As for where Claude’s resides in history, “That era was pretty much made,” adds Bullfrog. “It if hadn’t been Claude’s that became Claude’s, it would’ve been someplace else.” Spoken like a true Claude’s veteran.
