Insatiable

ALSO BY GAEL GREENE

Delicious Sex

Blue Skies, No Candy

Doctor Love

Bite: A New York Restaurant Strategy

Sex and the College Girl

Don’t Come Back Without It

To Clay Felker for his inspired casting and unswerving faith in provocation

To Don Forst, after all these years, still buffer and champion

To Steven Richter, my bemused and game Road Food Warrior

And to the memory of delicious times with Craig Claiborne

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most of
Insatiable
was written in the sanctuary of the little blue bedroom in East Hampton in the tight family embrace of the Schusters, Fran and Howard. In the lakeside cottage near Brewster with my loving friend Vicki Polon cheering me on (and bringing fruit and snacks hourly). And in an East Hampton guest room with my longtime confidante Barbara Goldsmith closeted in her own writing room alongside. The gift from Lili Lynton of her bright and airy Parisian pied-à-terre overlooking the garden of the Picasso museum and the luxurious haven of Randy Mickelson’s San Polo apartment in Venice freed me two winters in a row to write far from hometown distractions. Maurie and Hermine Nessin twice gave us August in their Aspen home.

Brilliant
New York
editors along the way—Deborah Harkins, Quita McMath, Phoebe Eaton, Robert Ickes among them—cajoled, provoked, and even tortured me into being better, funnier, tartly nastier than the first-draft me. I owe them far more even than I owe
Roget’s Thesaurus
. Editors and publishers after Clay—Joe Armstrong, James Brady, Ed Kosner, Caroline Miller—stoically bore the burden of staggering expense accounts. In my earliest writing days, when I channeled that Cosmo Girl for Helen Gurley Brown, Jeanette Sarkisian (now Wagner) guarded my words with intelligence and empathy. I’m grateful to Arthur Kretchmer at
Playboy
for excerpting
Blue Skies, No Candy
when no other magazine would dare.

Don Congdon, my dapper, wise, and widely respected old-world agent, took me in when I was an ingenue and guided my growth with unflagging enthusiasm for thirty years.

My new agent Jane Dystel believed in this book even more than I did and brilliantly plotted its path to Warner Books, where I owe a special debt to strong publisher Jamie Raab for shepherding this memoir, and for creating a contagion in-house. Harvey-Jane Kowal and Carol Edwards devoted hours to documenting research, inserting proper French accents, and tidying a sloppy manuscript. Thanks to Jimmy Franco for promotional strategy and to Ben Greenberg, patient and unflappable liaison. Special thanks to Larry Kirshbaum, who was also there for Warner’s dazzling launch of the paperback of
Blue Skies, No Candy
and promised me the moon again.

A pride of fine and opinionated cooks, bakers, and cookbook writers devoted precious time to testing my recipes: Rozanne Gold, Andrew Dornenburg, Eddie Schoenfeld, Adrienne Zausner, Vicki Polon, Mitch Weinstein, and Joan Harper (she flatly refused to use Crisco in my retro blueberry pie). And I’m grateful to Arthur Schwartz for finding a macaroni recipe so close to Mom’s. Karen Page and Suvie Saran have shared their priceless network and connections with a generosity beyond simple friendship.

I owe the remarkable definition of my arms and the neatness of my thighs to Che Florio and Karen Munson.

An instinctive, uninformed notion led James Beard, Barbara Kafka, Joe Baum, Donald Tober, Roger Yaseen, Ed Gifford, Harley Baldwin, and me that Sunday twenty-four years ago to feel that we who were so richly fed must bring food to the city’s frail, aging shut-ins. That whimsy became serious and professional thanks to the dedication and tenacity of Citymeals-on-Wheels executive director, Marcia Stein, the princes of New York’s grand families who lent weight to our board, and all the mayors beginning with Ed Koch, who cheered us on. To the relays of bright young staffers who toiled in the cubicles making Citymeals’ board members’ wild dreams into fund-raising triumphs and social policy and contracts fulfilled, I’m sorry I abused you.

I learned from so many—and stole from a few. Confessions follow.

All of us: my friends, my far-flung family, everyone I work with, my guy, and I myself must acknowledge a debt to the late, loving Mildred Newman—the unique and wise therapist with the green tea and the glamorous shoes—for the veneer of sanity that tempers my narcissism in this life of unbounded cravings.

P
RELUDE: THE
C
RAVING

I could embellish the story and write that I was just pulling a pair of crusty French baguettes out of the oven the fall afternoon of the momentous phone call. I like that image. But then how could you trust me? The unadorned truth is that I was more likely mashing an excess of Hellmann’s mayonnaise and a jot of Dijon mustard into some canned tuna (I won’t pretend I made my own mayonnaise, either). It was Clay Felker, asking me to be the restaurant critic for his infant
New York
magazine, just launched a few months earlier, in April 1968, and already provoking major buzz.

Me as a restaurant critic. I was taken by surprise . . . and, for a rare moment, didn’t know quite what to say. (I almost always have something to say, even if I haven’t a clue what I’m talking about. Not an admirable habit but apparently incurable.) Of course I planned to write for
New York
. It was new and brash, with an impressive stable of contributing editors that included Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem, Peter Maas, Harold Clurman, Barbara Goldsmith, Nicholas Pileggi, Jill Krementz, Albert Goldman, and Dick Schaap. There was no magazine anywhere like it. It was the talk of the town.

“I’d love to write for you,” I told Clay. “Once you start paying reasonable fees.” I was earning major money freelancing for
Ladies’ Home Journal,
McCall’s,
and
Cosmopolitan
. “How the World’s Great Beauties Stay Beautiful,” “How America Lives: The Woman with Seven Houses” (Marylou Whitney, of course . . . how America lives indeed). The word was that everyone at
New York
, star writers and unknowns alike, would be paid the same puny three hundred dollars an article till the magazine began to make money.

Eventually, I thought, I might want to write about food and restaurants, or almost anything. I’d written a long, juicy play-by-play for Clay Felker on Henri Soulé reopening La Côte Basque a few years earlier, when
New York
was the Sunday magazine of the ill-fated
Herald Tribune
. It was full of dish, like Soulé’s despair when fate gave Pat Nixon a luscious-looking fillet of striped bass that had apparently gasped its last breath in a gasoline wake. So, clearly that’s where Clay’s inspiration was coming from.

But to be
the
restaurant critic . . . in direct competition with the Great God Craig Claiborne. How reckless of Clay to nominate me as a candidate to brandish my fork in that world.

“What would you tell people my credentials are?” I asked.

“Well, aren’t you a food person?”

James Beard was a food person. Julia Child, my friend Paula Wolfert. I’m not normally one to sell myself short, but this would be serious exposure. I was just someone who followed Craig Claiborne’s trail in search of gastronomic epiphany. I was a cook. I’d taken a cooking class and learned to make pasta from scratch. “Well, I’ve eaten around,” I conceded. “But I can’t afford to write more than two or three times a year for a three-hundred-dollar fee.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Clay. “Dozens of people are begging to be
New York
’s restaurant critic so they can charge all their meals to us.”

Blinding lightbulbs exploded. Suddenly, it was all so clear. I could order from the right side of the menu instead of from the left as I’d always done (the dutiful daughter, the compassionate date, the penny-pinching wife). So I said “Yes” quickly, before my doubts could erode his confidence.

“We have to do it like Craig Claiborne does at the
Times,
” I said. “Anonymously. I’ll have to eat a minimum of three times before judging a restaurant—with friends—like he does. And pay the check.”

“Of course,” said Clay. “Of course.”

My husband, then an editor at the
New York Times
, was thrilled for me—and for our budget. Don Forst and I were a folie à deux of passionate foodies. We’d been saving our money to eat in all the great restaurants, skipping dessert, sharing an appetizer, braving the haughty maître d’s and the withering sommeliers as we thriftily ordered half a bottle of wine. We’d taken a ridiculously circuitous detour to France from Italy to be buttered up and become deliciously sloshed at the fabled La Pyramide—the Michelin three-star sacred to the late, great Fernand Point—because Don’s best friend said it was worth any detour. What did I know? I’d read
Blue Trout and Black Truffles,
by Joseph Wechsberg, and found myself inhabited by exotic cravings. And we’d gone back to France the next year, having died and then risen to heaven in a small two-star inn off the autoroute near Lyon, where a chef named Alain Chapel was cooking his heart out to win that third Michelin boutonniere. I’d bravely ordered the famous
gâteau de foies blonds,
the gossamer blond livers, and the challenging calf’s ear. Indeed, now that I thought about it from the perspective of Clay’s vision, my whole life had been leading up to this unforeseen, unimaginable moment.

Where should I start? I wondered. What restaurant would I celebrate or riddle with ridicule first? Would anyone trust me? What horrible arrows of innuendo were my betters going to shoot behind my back? I could almost hear Craig’s soft drawl of derision: “I took her to lunch once and now she thinks she’s a restaurant critic.”

In the days before professional gossipists multiplied like gerbils,
Women’s Wear Daily’s
“Eye” saw all and spilled all. Publisher John Fair-child’s irreverent focus on social X rays—designers on dawn disco patrol, working-class beauties who married up, and their hangouts—had transformed the Fairchild family’s dowdy little garment-business rag. He skewered the designers who displeased him, put slashing black lines through anyone he deemed a fashion victim, and documented the in and out of Manhattan dining mercilessly.

Having grown up in a fashion world—Daddy would sometimes take me to New York on buying trips for his women’s specialty shop, Nat Greene’s, on Livernois and Seven Mile Road in Detroit—I was already spoiled at thirteen, with half a dozen dresses by the great American original Claire McCardell hanging in my closet. I was tall. Skirts were long. And only the more expensive, more generously cut dresses were long enough for me.

Thus in 1957, I was already obsessed with fashion when I arrived in New York, having quit my wire-service job for the promise of a one-week tryout on the city desk at the
New York Post
(a job I got). I read
WWD
religiously so I could decide which Yves Saint Laurent or Givenchy designs to look for when authorized $69.95 copies arrived at Ohrbach’s, the late, lamented discount temple on Thirty-fourth Street.

Maybe I didn’t have the nerve to leap on the scene, criticizing veteran French chefs and fabled restaurateurs. But I was a reporter after all. I could write the who, where, what, and why. And I knew the sociology of Manhattan dining because I read
Women’s Wear
. It was my bible, my
Almanach de Gotha.
John Fairchild’s “Eye” was my muse. I owed everything I knew about what I thought of as “Toot New York” to
Women’s Wear
. I certainly knew enough not to wear my brown knit faux Saint Laurent pantsuit to La Côte Basque, because Madame Henriette Spalter, the late Henri Soulé’s ex-cashier/mistress, who now ran the place, considered the new mode unforgivably déclassé. Lynda Bird Johnson Robb had been required to strip off her taboo pants and eat lunch at La Côte Basque in her tunic.

I never dreamed I’d ever get close to dishing with
WWD
’s deliciously bitchy Fairchild at his favorite frog pond, La Grenouille. But thanks to his all-seeing “Eye,” I knew that William Paley had been fussing over every tiny detail of the Ground Floor, the new restaurant in Black Rock, his Eero Saarinen-designed CBS Building on Sixth Avenue. That sounded just right for a soft landing at
New York
magazine that fall of 1968.

It was a year of drama and upheaval. Columbia University was an armed camp just two miles north of where I hung my navy blue linen “Givenchy.” The city was deeply divided, the Establishment press aghast and disapproving of the student sit-ins at Columbia. “Are we the Establishment?” I asked Don, who was often exasperated with the rulings of his bosses at the
Times
. How embarrassing. The mantra was “Never trust anyone over thirty.” Of course I had to lie and silently subtract a few years so I could echo the rallying cry. There was mayhem at the Democratic National Convention, terrifying images of cops beating back the crowds, starving babies in Biafra. And I would be nervously focused on what famous faces were planted in Mr. Paley’s custom-order chairs. That was my mission. At times, the reality of the staring eyes and distended bellies of the hungry did pepper my view of our town’s budding gourmand excess with guilt. Yet everything I wrote would be feeding the fever of foodism, ultimately turning on susceptible taste buds to what would become a contagion, a cultural delirium.

After all, this was the mind-bending sixties, a time of unbridled experimentation and flaunting the rules. Not that I was inclined to be that thoughtful. I was too nervous. No one could have predicted how obsessed with food Americans would become. Certainly not me. All I knew was that this first critique, my exposure to the magazine’s demanding and savvy readership, would be a challenge. I knew I could so easily sound naïve and get laughed off the masthead.

I invited a friend to join me for lunch and went off to teach myself how to be a restaurant critic. I tried to think of it as just another journalistic assignment. It didn’t occur to me, as it does now, that I was a not-quite-innocent Alice tumbling down that rabbit hole. That in this upside-down world of the sixties (which didn’t really end till sometime in the mid-seventies), I would stumble into an astonishing new world as a person I scarcely recognized and never planned to be.