Morgan Freeman in his restaurant Madidi in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Photograph, James Patterson Getty Images.
John Carlin says he's still bewildered as to how he ended up having dinner with Morgan Freeman in a two-horse town in Mississippi.
It's a long story, but a meeting in the river-delta town of Clarksdale with someone called 'Clarksdale's Mr Big' led to the encounter with Freeman.
That in turn led to dinner at Morgan's restaurant and the unravelling of a fascinating story of how the actor-turned restaurateur plans to turn a 'bleak non-descript town' around with his gastronomic venture.
You can read the full story in Observer Food Monthly, free with this Sunday's paper, but here's a taster ...
Down we swept into the vast, flat Mississippi Delta, 'the most Southern place in the world', Bill informed me from his mobile phone. He kept calling, every 10 minutes or so, to give me a topographical update. The fourth time he called he happened to mention that he owned a restaurant in Clarksdale jointly with Morgan Freeman. 'I think Morgan may be flying in today so maybe you'll have a chance to meet him,' Bill said.
We drove on and, as we were nearing our destination, Bill suddenly turned sharp right off the highway. I followed him down a narrow road. He turned right a couple of times more and I pulled up behind him on the tarmac of Clarksdale's tiny airport next to a small silver jet, out of which popped Red, the long-term prisoner and aphorism-utterer of the Shawshank Redemption, also known as Morgan Freeman, in denim shirt and jeans. It was his own private jet. I looked around for a pilot, but didn't see one.
It turned out Freeman himself was the pilot. He'd just breezed over from a shoot in Virginia, like you do if you're scoring $20m a movie. He came here often, Bill told me. This was the part of the world he was from and he loved coming back. He lived in Los Angeles but kept a house (several houses, I later heard) in the Delta. Bill introduced me, we shook hands and that was that.
Off Bill and I proceeded to Clarksdale, a steamy furnace of a town - the Mississippi Delta in summer is brutal - with some neat little suburban homes on the periphery and not much of anything going on in the middle. What passes for downtown has a largely derelict feel to it, with one big empty lot and a couple of big wooden carcasses that were once warehouses. Life, if it was ever here, has shifted to a strip a few miles out of town along the highway. But Bill is doing his bit to re-inject some vitality into Clarksdale. It is 'the capital of the Blues', they say. Or at least where Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and a couple of other icons of the genre were born. Bill figured it seemed silly not to cash in on the fine marketing potential these past greats offered so, in 2002 he founded, with his friend Morgan, the Ground Zero Blues Club, a converted warehouse where they serve food and drinks and play live music.
The restaurant he owned with Freeman was another thing altogether, and rather fancy, I was told, by the name of Madidi. Bill and I agreed that we'd meet that evening at six and then go and have dinner there. He picked me up at six sharp in a massive SUV. Sitting in the back, reading the local paper, was Morgan Freeman. Or rather Red, the most appealingly world-weary character ever seen on film. He looked up as I came in, nodded, more with his eyelids than with his head, and carried on reading the paper. Laconic as all hell. We drove through Clarksdale's deserted streets to Bill's home. Freeman and I sat down in the lounge and Bill went off to fetch what turned out to be a very nice Californian sauvignon blanc.
Freeman was more comfortable with laconic than I was, but fortunately we soon hit on a conversation subject of mutual interest. South Africa. I lived there for six years; he had been there a number of times and knew Mandela. It turned out too that there was nothing much he would rather do in his professional career than play Mandela in a film. He performed a brief imitation that was impeccably true to the great man. It was the one subject we spoke of over the next three hours or so that really stirred him, shook up his sleepy Mississippi understatedness. He spoke about Mandela with feeling, with affection and admiration. We carried on talking animatedly about South Africa on the way to Madidi's.
The restaurant was a revelation. Open a place like Madidi's in New York or San Francisco, or London or Barcelona, and immediately it would be propelled into the top tier of city eating establishments. Deliciously air-conditioned, it is spacious, with ample gaps between the tables, each covered in white linen and top-of-the range cutlery and glassware. Bill apologised for the wine list. Said that the state of Mississippi had some ludicrously outdated laws that severely limited the range of imported wines one could stock. But there was still plenty of good stuff from France, Italy and Australia, as well as the US.
I asked Luckett and Freeman what had possessed them to set up this aberrant establishment in Clarksdale in the first place. 'First of all, I just wanted a good place to come and eat when I came on my visits here,' said Freeman, with the merest suggestion of a wink. 'The nearest decent dining otherwise was in Memphis, and that's too far.' He has a face that seems made for looking serious; dauntingly so if he put his mind to it, one suspects. He achieves his effects with the tiniest adjustments of his facial muscles. Yet once he lets go a bit, a playfulness emerges about the eyes that, in combination with the dour, leaning towards hang-dog set of his features, is very winning. He meant what he said about having selfish motives for setting up the restaurant, but there was more to it than that.
You can, of course, read the whole interview in Observer Food Monthly on Sunday.
