It was this month, thirty years ago, that Hollywood came to the Outer Cape. The occasion was the filming of Norman Mailer’s crime novel, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which was set in Provincetown. It wasn’t a very good novel, and the film wasn’t much better, but it starred Ryan O’Neil and Isabella Rossellini, and for a week or two some people were excited about the possibility of sighting a movie star or two in our small villages in the off-season.
One place people weren’t excited was Nonnie’s Country Kitchen in Orleans. Nonnie’s was a classic “local” restaurant, with a long Formica counter with stools, and an assortment of pine tables. They cooked a good hamburger and your Coke was always served to you in a can with a glass, no ice. The restaurant was named after its owner, Leonora “Nonnie" Degnan, who ran it for 44 years until her death in 2010. She tried to retire once, but found out she didn’t like retirement and so reopened the restaurant after a year or so. She was a no-nonsense Cape Codder who didn’t make much small talk, but she was always ready to refill your coffee cup and give her opinion on anything if asked.
One day in early November of 1986 I stopped in at Nonnie’s for lunch. As I sat at the counter, I was somewhat non-plussed to see a bright red Maserati pull up among the rusty pick-ups in the small parking lot. A few moments later a man and a woman came in to the restaurant and all conversation immediately ceased. The silence was deafening. All heads strained not to turn in their direction.
The man was in his early thirties, tall with curly hair and a model’s jaw, wearing a long black leather jacket and shades. The woman was a knockout – a statuesque black woman with beautiful, bronze skin, blue eyelids and rouged cheeks, black silky hair, an open smile with perfect white teeth, bright red lipstick and nails. She was dressed in a full-length, gold lame dress, high at the neck and cinched at the waist and wrists, falling in liquid pleats down to her ankles where they met black, high-heeled shoes. They both looked as if they had just stepped out of a Vanity Fair photo shoot.
They stood at the counter for a few minutes, discussing the menu. Nonnie stood waiting with her pad, her expression giving away nothing. They asked her, “How’s the seafood chowder?’
“Well,” said Nonnie, “We sell a lot of it.”
“O.K.,” the man said, we’ll take two orders.”
They sat down next to me to wait, discussing how long it would take them to get to Provincetown. “I think about two hours,” said the man. Then he began speaking in low, earnest tones, the kind certain men use when talking about relationships. When she opened up her black leather Gucci bag to pay for the chowder, I noticed two or three short straight scars, like razor cuts, on the top of each of her beautiful brown hands. They left a generous tip.
The second they were out the door, everyone in the place looked at one another and smiled, that conspiratorial smile of insiders. Still, no one said a word until Nonnie herself finally spoke: “I hate it when people do that, asking me if something is any good. What am I supposed to say, ‘No, but we’re trying to get rid of it?’ or ‘I don’t know, we’ve never made it before?’”
“You think maybe they’re from out of town?” I ventured
“Outer space,” said Nonnie.
