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My Last Meal at the Montaigne

The eccentric Jim Leake founded the most exclusive private club in Dallas. For 10 years, we loved it. Sadly, it won’t be the same without him.
By D Magazine |

ONE FOR THE ROAD: Some of the richest men in Dallas have bellied up to the Montaigne bar.

Perhaps you’ve seen the curious salmon-colored building on Maple Avenue, across the street from the Crescent, and wondered. At five stories, with wrought-iron, New Orleans-style railings on its balconies and French, American, and Texas flags mounted in front of a hard-to-decipher escutcheon, it looks a bit like a consulate. But that is the Montaigne Club, one of the most exclusive private clubs in Dallas. Its membership roster includes—or included—the most prestigious, most moneyed names in town: older ones such as Murchison, Hunt, and Strauss; newer ones such as Tom Hicks, Harold Simmons, Boone Pickens, Jerry Jones, and Ed Cox; and many others, mostly men, mostly quite successful in their fields.

For a decade, the Montaigne Club has stood as a monument to the taste, grace, and eccentricities of its founder, Jim Leake. You’d usually find him at the bar, trim and almost regimental in his tailored suit, his slightly bulbous nose betraying a fondness for fine wine and bourbon Old-Fashioneds. If you were fortunate, you’d catch Jim and his stunning wife Lynda doing a dance he dubbed the Montango. Everything about the club was like that dance: rehearsed to the last detail, staged for maximum effect, and utterly charming.

Sadly, that’s all changing. By the time you read this, the Montaigne Club might be a public restaurant. If so, go on in and look around, but expect to find little remaining of what will be described here. Jim, 72, suffered a serious stroke in August, and the club changed hands in December.

The man who fashioned a haven for the elite grew up poor in Louisiana. As a freshman at a small state college in Natchitoches, Leake fell in with gamblers and found work as a “mule” in the back poker room of a pool hall called Slim’s. A mule is essentially a shill who plays with house money to keep the action going. Jim could win $4,000 in a single night, enough at the time to buy a new Cadillac. But he was paid by the hour, 90 cents.

Leake went on to play with his own money in games at a variety of colleges, the U.S. Army, and, finally, SMU law school. He was eventually barred from a legendary Monday night high-stakes game at the Mansion on Turtle Creek for winning too much.

Jim probably played cards better than he played golf, but that didn’t stop him from betting on the links, too. One wager in particular became so talked about that the Dallas Morning News put it in print. In 1989, at Preston Trails, Jim challenged touring pro Lannie Wadkins to a match—but with a twist. Because Wadkins was better than Jim, by about 15 strokes a round, it was agreed that each man would hit two balls on every shot. Wadkins played his worse ball. Jim played his better. Wadkins himself didn’t wager, but Jim offered to cover all bets placed on his opponent, of which there were many. More than 100 people turned out to watch Jim win. The newspaper mentioned a figure of $30,000 but allowed that it could have been higher.

Jim wrote about much of this—the poker, the golf—in his self-published autobiography, Reflections of a Society Gambler (On the Game of Life). It was a vanity project, like the Montaigne Club itself, which is pictured on the back of the book’s dust jacket.

By 1995, Jim had done well for himself. In business, he put his money to work in a variety of enterprises: oil leases, commercial paper, a medical services business. And what fellow hasn’t dreamed of owning his own saloon? So one day, as Jim retold the story countless times, he stood up in the locker room at the men-only Preston Trails and proclaimed that he was forming a new club.

He said it would be a place “where we can eat the finest foods and drink the finest wines, where we can enjoy good fellowship and philosophical conversations, where women will be welcome and where no smoking will be permitted. We’ll also set aside part of our dues to support the arts.” When Jim returned from his round of golf, he found a check in his locker from the new club’s first member, Mickey Mantle.

THE MAN, THE MYTH: Jim Leake hung paintings of himself in the club, including this one (below) in which he dined with Jefferson, Churchill, and Christ.

Leake was serious about the “philosophical conversations.” Hence the club’s namesake, the 16th-century French philosopher the Marquis Michel de Montaigne. (That’s his escutcheon out front.) Early on, Jim hired Paul Hunter, a community college instructor with a punctilious air, a deep voice, and a collection of truly strange suits, to lead monthly wine and philosophy hours on the Montaigne’s essays.

From top to bottom, the place was a reflection of Leake: his tastes, interests, foibles, and spectacular ego. He had the building built to his specifications and lived for years on the top floor. There are at least 50 pictures of him throughout the four rooms of the club, including a painting of his fantasy dinner party in which Leake’s image appears three times with the likes of Jefferson, Churchill, Kahlo, and Christ.

Leake hired and fired the staff, oversaw quality control on the food and wine, supervised the décor, and served as a one-man membership committee. I suspect I got in that first year through some combination of noblesse oblige and Jim’s desire to keep a tiny quota of liberals around to flavor the conversational gumbo.

In my opinion, the Montaigne had the best kitchen in town, thanks to its small size (no more than 42 meals a night), limited menu (a choice of three steaks, fresh fish, or a special such as veal or shrimp), and the efforts of chef George Dozier (Jim’s nephew) and his wife Lisa, who prepared salads and desserts. It was also one of Dallas’ pricier restaurants, with an unwritten menu that topped out at $65, a price ameliorated slightly by the fact that it included vegetables, soup, and salad. Wine, of course, was extra—and there were some dear and excellent wines. Lunch was less costly and was served only on Monday because that is the day Preston Trails and most other country clubs are closed.

In spite of all of this, the Montaigne lost money every year except 2004, according to its former general manager, Nic Schindel. “The club was set up as a nonprofit, and it was set up to offer the best, not to make money,” Schindel says. “Mr. Leake more or less cheerfully covered the losses.”

One reason for the losses might have been the club’s antic schedule, open for dinner Wednesday through Saturday and for Monday lunch. Another reason might have been the surprisingly low dues. Depending on the year you joined, the initiation fee was between $400 and $650 (with part going to support the arts), and monthly dues were $40 or $50. In addition, the rents for the seven apartments above the club were quite low at $1 per square foot. Ranging from 1,200 to 3,200 square feet, and peopled with Jim’s friends, these became a kind of frat house for well-off, recently divorced men.

“If someone came home with a particularly hot-looking date, he’d knock on all the doors and show her off to everybody,” says one early Montaigne resident. Another Montaigne resident used to hang each new date’s bra from the horns of a stuffed musk ox that for years stood guard in the building’s lobby.

One charter resident said that on the day he moved in, he was admiring the building from across the street when two attractive women walked by. He recalls the conversation as going something like this:

Woman No. 1: “What’s that?”

Woman No. 2: “I hear it’s a club where rich men bring their mistresses.”

Woman No. 1: [to new resident, who’s laughing]: “What’s so funny?”

Resident: “I hope you’re right. I’m just moving in.”

The apartments above the club became a kind of frat house for well-off, recently divorced men. One resident hung each new date’s bra from the horns of a stuffed ox.

Those who recall the movie Goodfellas know that Friday nights were reserved for the mistresses and Saturdays for the wives. For the most part, that didn’t hold for the Montaigne, which was always a place one took one’s wife. According to Schindel, “The only guy who didn’t seem to get the memo was [a leading sportsman]. He’d show up with a different young woman every time he came in and would introduce her around. I’m guessing that Mr. Leake had a word with him, because suddenly he started bringing his wife.”

Other than the expected amount of drunkenness, one or two minor shoving matches, and occasional over-exuberant backgammon betting in the game room, behavior in the club was quite decorous.

About that game room. Early on, members were encouraged to bring in a piece of humiliating personal memorabilia, and the walls were covered with them. Mickey Mantle put up a “hall of shame” picture enumerating his strikeouts and other unhappy records. There were signs from failed political campaigns.

My modest entry was a photo of my wife Bobbi and me in which we appear to be dancing with Porky, Goofy, and other animated characters. One photo depicted two members on the beach at St. Tropez surrounded by smiling, bikinied Eastern European girls. In front of them is a Nebuchadnezzar of Dom Perignon, ordered at a cost of 12,000 Euros (about $14,500 today). According to the two, the girls stayed around precisely as long as the champagne lasted.

And the Montaigne Club stayed around in its original form precisely as long as the good health of its founder lasted. For reasons known only to him, he sold the building to Ali “Al” Heidari, proprietor of the Old Warsaw, just down the street.

For all Jim’s fondness for his own pictures and his willingness to write an autobiography, he has always been a private person. He isn’t talking now, but a number of members and former staffers have speculated to me that Jim, ever the egoist, made this deal in the hope that the club would fail without him. The sad transition was announced to the members in a December letter from Lynda Leake assuring everyone that Heidari would “continue the traditions of the club.” Heidari more or less promised me the same, even as he canceled the wine and philosophy hour, changed the menu and décor, and got rid of the general manager, the chefs, the pianist, and most of the employees who made the club what it was.

This is made doubly bitter to me because the original Old Warsaw, a small, elegant, extravagantly expensive spot on Cedar Springs, was once the finest restaurant in town. Thanks to my occasionally indulgent parents and the charming family of Polish émigrés who ran it, the original Old Warsaw was my introduction to fine dining. Its current incarnation is something else entirely. It’s sad to see that name on the overblown, overpriced joint Heidari runs today, with over-the-top hand-kissing greetings, congealed sauces, and tableside service that’s all show and no substance.

Even assuming the best intentions on Heidari’s part, the culture clash between what his Old Warsaw is and what the Montaigne Club was seems beyond his understanding. The new general manager is Heidari’s daughter Monique, a 22-year-old recent graduate of UTD. She put her stamp on the place by replacing paintings in the library with works purchased at the World Trade Center that can best be described as what Thomas Kinkade might have created had he lived during the Impressionist era. In the game room, the personal artifacts of disgruntled ex-members were replaced by photos of Sinatra and the Rat Pack.

The food, too, has changed for the worse. At what will likely be my last meal at the Montaigne Club, I was served a flavorless bowl of chicken and overcooked dumplings that made me sick to my stomach.

Then an old friend sat down at my table. “There’s a movement afoot to move this sucker to a beautiful new building that a friend of ours has just completed,” he said. “We’ll hire all the old people back, and it’ll be just like it was.”

Other members are discussing similar mutinies, and I wish them luck. Without Jim Leake, it’ll never truly be the Montaigne Club.

Let’s give the final words to Montaigne himself. Written centuries ago in a different context, they apply well to Jim, the Marquis, and the wonderful place on which both stamped their brands: “I do not consider what it is now, but what it was then.”


Spencer Michlin has written for the Dallas Observer, the Dallas Morning News, and Southwest Airline’s Spirit magazine.

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