Insatiable (23 page)

Macy’s Cellar got grander and more global. And the first Greenmarket opened. Not long after, Dean & DeLuca lured us downtown with the market as art gallery on Prince Street. The corner superettes, long mom-and-pop acts, often Jewish, were bought by Koreans, and suddenly we could find fresh flowers for sale twenty-four hours a day.

Flying Foods downtown, wholesaler and broker of exotica, brought in out-of-season greens from other hemispheres, exotic mushrooms all year round, and a rash of radicchio. Back in Detroit, my mom, Saralee, refused to venture beyond iceberg, but the mesclun revolution was making waves across the country and certainly in her supermarket.

The year 1977 brought an MSG scare, and no wonder. With three master chefs in residence in New York City, Chinese food had never been more beautiful or more exciting. At Shun Lee Palace, master T. T. Wang orchestrated supernal hot-and-sour soup and cold appetizers so searingly peppered, some of us broke out in a sweat. As addicted as I was to peanut butter as a child, I now became fixated on Shun Lee’s peanut buttery sesame hacked chicken. Uncle Lu dynamited heads off with torrid stir-fries at Hunam on Second Avenue, a side venture of Wang, with a young Michael Tong as his clever sidekick in the dining room. Uncle Tai perfected slithery caramelized venison and cold peppered rabbit, mysterious and fiery, sweet and silken at David Keh’s blue-painted Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan on Third Avenue. Tai’s voluptuous orange beef became the signature of his second, Chef Ho, who went off to open Fortune Garden.

David Keh’s feng shui must have been working in those years. Keh had a sweet, shy charm and a knack for pleasing fussy celebrities, though he often left majordomos to run his dining room while he went out to play. He had arrived in America in 1965, headed for Seton College from China’s remote Anhui province. One hundred dollars borrowed from a San Francisco friend of his father let him cross the country on a ninety-nine-dollar Greyhound deal with a sack of hard-boiled eggs. He found his way that first night to the Chinese Pavilion of the World’s Fair in Queens. There, he cleaned toilets and slept on a bench till he could afford a room.

Waiting tables at Four Seas in Wall Street, he met Lu Hoy Yuen and teamed with that brilliant, natural cook to open Szechuan Taste on Chatham Square. New Yorkers rallied by our magazine’s Underground Gourmet—then Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder—went bananas for that fierce chili heat. Szechuan uptown on Second Avenue made Keh rich and Lu famous, but Lu was lonely and soon disappeared. David Keh’s ambition was to open the Lutèce of Chinese restaurants, he told me. That was what he had in mind for Chung Kuo—Rosenthal china, fresh red roses on every table—in the space that had been Longchamps on Third and Sixty-fifth. Someone pointed out that the name had twenty-eight strokes, an ill-fated number. He changed the logo to David K and his temple of luxury took off in spite of prices unhead of for Chinese food. Later, David would launch the unknown Zarela Martinez in architect Sam Lopata’s brilliantly shadowed Café Marimba below his David K in a move to get the union off his back.

Once midway through appetizers at his Uncle Tai, I noticed three men in long black coats over kitchen whites walk in the front door and march straight to the kitchen, summoned from who knew where to bolster the troops for my dinner. Though Keh could be distracted by mah-jongg, a pretty face, and good times with cronies in Hong Kong and Taiwan, he didn’t miss a trick, certainly not a restaurant critic.

Late in the seventies, New Yorkers who thought tuna came only in cans began to discover sushi. Scattered Westerners joined the Japanese businessmen at the sushi counter in Nippon and Hatsuhana and learned to say
“omakase”
—“Let the chef decide.” With my friend Joel Grey as my sensai, my first
omakase
at Takezushi—a “Hallelujah Chorus” of seafood crunch and mystic rice—was a revelation.

Between rounds of excessive feasting, millions went on the Scarsdale diet. Soon it became a book, and it found new life on the best-seller list when its author lost his life, shot by a disheartened lover after she discovered his infidelity. (His bedsheets gave him away, she said. He should have changed the sheets, outraged feminists agreed.)

After fourteen years bumping heads with the city’s bureaucracy, Buzzy O’Keeffe opened the River Café in 1977—a major waterfront victory, lashed to a barge, with a lyrically romantic eye on the Manhattan skyline. Soon it would nurture a line of thoroughbred cooks, Charles Palmer (later at Aureole), David Burke (who would perfect his playful ways at Park Avenue Cafe), and the dessert master Richard Leach. There were critical boos for the food in the first few months, but then chef Larry Forgione arrived with free range from O’Keeffe to buy only the best. Not long after, a poultry farmer, with subsidies from Forgione’s budget, was raising chicken in a revolutionary old-fashioned way. “Free-range” it said on the menu.

Sometime in the summer of 1977, I couldn’t help but notice that Le Cirque’s kitchen was finding its own new identity. No way could I miss the sunny evolution, because I happened to be keeping occasional company with the proud new
chef de cuisine,
Jean-Louis Todeschini. He loved to eat. He loved to dance after his crew scoured the kitchen at 1:00
AM.
But after spending two weeks with him that fall touring France, I worried gossips might question anything I wrote about Le Cirque. Rather than wait for the bitches to chatter, I titled my mostly enthusiastic review “I Love Le Cirque, But Can I Be Trusted?”

The city broke out in a rash of sun-dried tomatoes. Anyone who didn’t jog signed up for aerobic dancing. Some took fitness seriously. The rest of us worked out religiously so we could eat. Die-hard traditionalists in the fancy French restaurants still sauced and carved tableside, but our own nouvellistes arranged plates in the kitchen and sent them out under shiny silver bells—inspiring cloche-lifting choreography that provoked oohs and aahs and nervous giggles.

My dear friend Naomi called, always looking out for the welfare of my lovelorn heart, since she knew Andrew, her erotically charged accountant, was still keeping me dangling. Her husband’s cousin had met a recently divorced “perfect man for you.” I invited real estate developer Harley Baldwin to join me for a reviewing lunch that lasted till five o’clock, when we walked home through the park, still talking nonstop. I left him at the Dakota to change for dinner. He was tall, with an athlete’s long muscles and the face of a Gerber baby—pale blond, blue-eyed, pink cheeks. It was clear at once we were soul mates, but after three consecutive evenings of dinner, dancing, a black-tie benefit, and chaste kisses, Harley finally set me straight. He was not the perfect man for me. “I have a lover named Peter” was how he put it. We became pals, constant companions, sometimes the two, often the three of us. I tried everything I knew to straighten him out.

“It’s so much more psychologically mature to be bisexual,” I lectured him. “To be able to respond sexually to either gender.” Though he conceded that in certain crucial sexual acts I was almost as good as a man, he had divorced his adored wife, made a strong commitment to his gay side. I should have met him in high school, he said.

Harley had been named the designated developer of Bridgemarket in the crumbling but gorgeous space under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge used as a garage by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. His plan called for a Greenmarket, rows and rows of ethnic shops and bakeries from all known countries and any yet to be discovered, and a restaurant or two. The architect’s sketches looked like they’d been drawn by Palladio. His days were spent fencing with the community and the bureaucracy. Evenings, he wooed the great cooks he wanted to move into Bridgemarket. He’d been born in Chicago but had done a few deals in Aspen. He became the Rocky Mountain Sybarite, a character in my reviews.

“Come with us to Harlem for barbecued spareribs,” he said one afternoon.

“You’re kidding. You are not Cole Porter. I am not Helen Morgan. These are not those bad old good old days when people like us had fun in Harlem.”

It was 1979, and to be frank, I wasn’t sure how welcome I’d be fried chicken-hopping in Harlem with a duo of aging blond preppies. Two whiter WASPS, I’d never seen. Harlem had not been all that welcoming to white forays since Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of that bus and the civil rights struggle began. Black Power had pretty much drawn a Maginot Line. You could feel the tension in the subway without going all the way to 125th Street.

But off we went for glorious ribs, transcendent candied sweets . . . and the warmest welcome at Sylvia’s, on Lenox Avenue, just north of 126th Street, a neighborhood both shabby and forlorn, if not forbidding. “Sylvia Queen of Soul Food,” as it said on the menu, was there to greet Harley when we returned one Saturday for breakfast. He had his mind set on luring Sylvia to Bridgemarket. Breakfast was an adventure, a bargain, a lark. The grits were impeccably smooth and full of that nutty hominy flavor. Two eggs with grits and homemade hot biscuits cost only a dollar. We tried the sausage and slab bacon, too, a salmon croquette, and the pork chop, smothered, of course, in gravy goo.

“Harlem on My Mind” in
New York
enticed eager downtowners up to Lenox Avenue. And soon Sylvia had expanded into the two stores north of the narrow little counterette. Long ago (before she opened a jazz supper club on the corner and tourists started busing in for gospel breakfasts), Sylvia Woods gave me a plaque commemorating my ode to her sassy ribs, sometimes hot, sometimes hotter. It should have gone to Harley, of course.

What a sense-reeling joyride life in the seventies was for a restaurant critic. I watched the fever spread as pilgrims from French kitchens arrived and scored or stumbled and retreated while self-taught Americans in love with French cooking dared dramatic diversions. In 1979, I heralded Le Plasir as the debut of the year. A Wall Street analyst named Peter Josten, and Steven Spector, a well-meaning dilettante and dabbler in real estate and art, had created a peach-glow cloister on 969 Lexington Avenue. Each table had its butter in the shape of a small bird, homage to Griggstown Farm, where the partners raised aristocratic quail for the town’s fussy chefs. And there was Claude Baills, late of the Palace, in the kitchen. Good word of mouth filled the house almost at once, but too soon, during a major snowstorm, the temperamental Baills walked out, abandoning his innocent moneymen. The house was fully booked. Veteran restaurant consultant Barbara Kafka realized that the Japanese sous-chef, Masataka Kobayashi, had the skill to carry on but lacked the confidence. She found him a partner overseas.

What a shock, then, when Le Plasir reemerged and quickly hit its stride. It seemed that the overly modest Masa had the right stuff after all. Everything he did was rare, lightly cooked, barely poached, sparingly seared—tender, bursting with a natural sweetness. “This is the Japanese sensibility of the nouvelle cuisine, splendidly executed,” I wrote in a bit of seventies gibberish. “Happily, the idiom is almost second nature for Masa. It’s in his bones. If the sauces do not always sing, they hum on key.”

Too soon, the keeper of an inn in the Napa Valley came along, tempting the chef to go west. Masa announced that he would move to California so his children could have a better life. The twice-wounded partners did not have the heart to start over yet again. Le Plasir died. Masa went off to became a San Francisco star. Ironically, given the security he sought, he found violence. His murder in November 1984 has never been solved.

Thanks to Paul Bocuse and his merry pranksters, professional cooking had new cachet. But unlike the Bocuse born-to-the-whisk band, the new American chefs were former marine biologists, lawyers, engineers. Barry and Susan Wine brought the Quilted Giraffe from New Paltz to a Greek coffee shop on Second Avenue. Karen and Bobby Pritsker came from Boston to open Dodin-Bouffant. Karen and David Waltuck made Chanterelle into a beacon of light on a desolate stretch of SoHo.
*

A year after founding
Food & Wine
magazine in 1978, Michael and Ariane Batterberry organized a first-year-anniversary gathering of rising stars and celebrated chefs at Tavern on the Green. “It was the first time American chefs cooked on the same footing with European chefs, at a time when the term
American chef
was still an oxymoron in most people’s minds,” Batterberry recalls. “And all the products were American. The French came expecting to knock people dead with their nouvelle cuisine and there was Alice Waters, doing very similar things. Paul Prudhomme received a standing ovation and he in turn saluted Alice, who, he said, ‘sure beat the pants off those Frenchmen.’” The press that followed seized on the American triumph.
Food & Wine,
Batterberry believes, was the “visionary magazine in what was becoming a visionary age of food.”

For a while, it might have seemed I was a hopelessly elitest voice speaking for a manic minority, but now we were hearing from newly-hatched sybarites in Minneapolis, New Orleans, Santa Monica, Berkeley, Chicago, all across the country.

32

B
LUE
S
KIES AND
C
ANDY
, T
OO

S
UMMER—WHEN THE BOOK WORLD USED TO SPACE OUT AND NAP IN
lawn chairs—was not prime publishing time. And in that summer of 1976, not much else was coming off the press, so William Morrow thought my first novel,
Blue Skies, No Candy,
could make a splash. They had bought the long-gestating opus on the basis of the one hundred pages written at the MacDowell Colony after Murray’s goading. It had taken me three more summers to finish my story of the screenwriter Kate, who seemed to have everything a liberated women could want—adoring husband, well-adjusted child, enthusiastic afternoon lovers—and yet it wasn’t enough. Kate’s narrative would begin in bed, I had decided, because that’s where Kate felt most womanly. I wanted even male readers to know what sex could feel like to a woman. So I used all the senses, all the sensory words I used to describe food—the taste and smell of it, the sound and heat. I would put the reader into bed with Kate. It had not occurred to me that not everyone would be comfortable there.

Certainly there was already a buzz. People who thought they knew the real me from my rants and ravings in
New York
seemed to be curious to see what a restaurant critic could do in a novel.

Even so, I never anticipated that devils would be primed to pounce. One week after the official publication date of
Blue Skies
exposed my brave Kate and her joyful hobby of adultery in the afternoon, the novel was cruelly shredded in
Newsweek
and by both Anatole Broyard in the daily
Times
(ironically, he prided himself on being the paper’s self-appointed champion of sensuality) and by an outraged Donald E. Westlake on Sunday. “Kate’s fantasies, or her lovers . . . sound like Krafft-Ebing in a Classic Comics translation,” Broyard wrote.
Newsweek
’s critic seemed equally offended: “It’s just like all the Nurse Barton books and those crazy career-girl romances you’re crazy about—except it’s really dirty.” “According to this book,” Westlake carped, “not only are women’s sexual fantasies as banal and repetitive as men’s, they are men’s.”

Three strikes, I was out. I was devastated. Cooler heads than mine might have asked why I was so surprised at the barbed response: all that graphic coupling, the zipless fucks, the wet pussies, and the heroine’s pride in her art of fellatio. No, no, no. I truly thought there was an audience out there ready to discover a woman’s sheer carnal joy. I never took into account that the odds of an unabashed sensualist being assigned to review my book were slim to zero.

I had been struggling to finish the novel two years earlier, when Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying
landed with an explosion of publicity. (I couldn’t call it
Skin Flick
anymore because someone had published a book called
Kinflicks
and it wasn’t
Blue Skies
yet because I couldn’t settle on a name.) Jong’s book made me nervous. Now my book would not be unique. It would be a symptom, a trend, yet another sticky-paged sexy romp by a woman. I wanted to read Jong’s novel, but I was afraid I would be influenced in some way or maybe find myself paralyzed, unable to finish.

I asked a publishing friend to read it and tell me whatever I needed to know. “Don’t read it till you finish your book,” he said.

“Is it too late?” I asked. “Has she written the same book?”

“Not at all,” he said soothingly. “It’s totally different. I just think you shouldn’t let it distract you.”

I didn’t believe him for a minute. Oh damn, Erica has written my book, I thought. Later, when I finally read it, I laughed at the similarity—two sets of lovers driving though France, madly coupling. But her lovers had menstrual periods at inopportune moments and got bitten by mosquitoes. Mine melted into molten joy and had multiple orgasms. Of course, Erica had better bloodlines. She was an intellectual and a poet. I was merely an ex-newspaper reporter who had found God in the details of
uni
sushi and truffled fettuccine.

Now in the summer of unleashing
Blue Skies,
smarting from three public spankings, I was devastated. I crept into bed and languished in the dark for three days. Then Murray called from California. It was Murray’s fault. He’d misled me in every way. Since that wild euphoric fling through France, our romance had played out like “Send in the Clowns.” He was free, but I wasn’t. I was free, but he wasn’t. He was free. Oh, forget it. One of us was always up in the air when the other hit the ground. Murray had dared me to stop talking about writing a novel and write it. He had bossily dictated the plot that afternoon on the road between Lyon and Les Baux. And he had line-edited the final edited version three years later. What could he have been thinking?

“How could you let me publish it?” I cried. “If it’s such stupid Nurse Barton crap, why did you let me publish it?”

“But it’s not porn,” he said. “Listen to me, sweetie. It’s wonderful. It’s powerful and funny. . . . It’s a woman writing about a woman’s erotic feelings. Don’t you get it? These three critics attacking you are all men. It’s so obvious. They are terrified by a sexual woman. Women will love this book. Talk to your publisher,” he urged. “Get women you know to write their comments. Let them run it as an ad.”

The ad ran—a tombstone, two long columns the length of the
Times
daily book page.
NOT SINCE HENRY MILLER HAS A BOOK ABOUT SEX CAUSED SUCH A FUROR,
the headline read. “The Men Can’t Take It” was printed atop the first column, above the cruelest excerpts from the three male critics. Below that stretched a yard of white space. The other column was captioned “But Women Love It,” followed by positive quotes from a roster of well-known women that ran all the way to the bottom of the page.

“A super talented writer has taken a completely original voyage into the lushness of women’s sexual longings. I think of Greene as a contemporary Colette,” wrote the novelist Ruth Harris. (Should I have been embarrassed running these quotes? Yes, she was a pal.)

“. . . Greene has written about sexuality the way she has always written about food—as a necessity of life which can also be sublime,” cookbook writer Paula Wolfert commented. (A longtime friend, too. Well, so what?)

“If it’s Philip Roth, sex is fine and fun,” Gloria Steinem wrote. “If it’s Gael Greene, its ‘psychopathology.’ Read this book . . . you’ll see these male reviewers are reviewing themselves.” (Gloria would never lie.)

The ad ran once. That was all the budget allowed. But, in fact, the devastating reviews—echoed by attacks from newspapers all over the country—had boosted
Blue Skies
onto the
New York Times
best-seller list. I had fantasized being banned in Boston. That would have been almost fun. I could have rallied the ACLU. These attacks on my writing really hurt, but it was having a positive impact on my bank account. Every few weeks, Morrow would order another printing.

Though I had never anticipated the furor
Blue Skies
provoked, I think I realized I could never have published the book if my father had still been alive. As for Mom, well, Saralee was a survivor. The two of us had often conspired to protect Dad from painful realities. But now as I flew home to Detroit on my book tour, I was anxious. All my aunts and cousins and Mother’s canasta pals were lined up at the Bloomfield Hills bookshop to buy my book and get it autographed. Aunt Rynee was already pursing her lips and tut-tutting: “I hear it’s even dirtier than
Forever Amber.
”

“What are you going to tell them, Mom,” I asked, “when they say how could you raise a daughter that would write such filth?”

She smiled and handed me a homemade chocolate chip cookie, from the stash she’d baked to send to my doctor brother in Chicago.

“Don’t worry, dear,” she said. “I’ll just tell them that’s what you have to do to sell a novel these days.”

Much later, when she’d read it and I got the courage to ask what she thought, her only comment was, “I’m glad I read it. Now I know other people do those things. The blow . . . you know.” She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “I always thought it was something your father invented just for us.”

In certain rarefied circles, I had been a food goddess. Now I was a sex queen, I discovered, as I flew from one city to the next to promote the book. My legs were everywhere. Kindly photographers showed me how to cross them for the ultimate legginess. The big black wide-brimmed hat I hide under for publicity photos became famous. There was a pink one with flowers, too. I was as likely to be photographed lying down as not. Bill Boggs interviewed me on his noon TV show, with the two of us lying on a double bed . . . fully dressed and not touching, of course. Interviewers were shocked or amused or outraged. One reporter dismissed me as drab and mousy, dressed like a librarian. Another thought the same slit skirt and ankle straps were a bit sluttish. What questions they asked. Suddenly, I was a sex expert. This was about the time the media was discovering and celebrating (or poking fun at) a source of female pleasure called the G-spot. Many women had always suspected there had to be something going on down there. Certainly my heroine, Kate, knew. Now my opinion on such matters was in demand. Anyway, it was called the G-spot, but not after me.

Warner Books launched a spectacular publicity campaign for the paperback of
Blue Skies, No Candy
in the fall of 1978. One of the top women runners in the New York City Marathon crossed the finish line wearing a
Blue Skies
T-shirt. (No, she wasn’t first. Maybe she stopped to make out along the way.) A giant billboard went up in Hollywood. The cover, the title, and my name winked on and off in colored lights on the screen above the moving headlines on the tower in Times Square.

I was on the road again, barnstorming for the paperback, when I got a call saying the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had banned my ads and pulled down eight thousand subway cards and three thousand bus posters with a version of the book’s undeniably racy cover: a photograph of a woman’s manicured hand tugging down the zipper on a pair of jeans “obviously worn by a man,” as the
Post
reported. WCBS was quick to telecast complaints about this moral transgression, and the MTA quickly caved in.

I was never really comfortable with that cover. When I first saw it, I was so upset that I begged publisher Howard Kaminsky to do something not quite so raunchy.

“This is a brilliant cover,” he insisted. “I promise you this cover will sell an extra million copies of your book.”

I dabbed at my tears. “What can I say, Howard?” I replied, surrendering. “You are the expert at publishing.”

When the first small carton of books arrived, I ripped it open and screamed. No one had shown me the back cover. There was the cloudy blue sky and the jeans again, this time with my portrait emerging from the unzippered fly.

It was Saturday. I called Kaminsky at home. He was watching a football game. But for a hysterical woman, he pulled himself away and came to the phone.

“How could you put my face in that crotch?” I cried. “I agree the front cover is brilliant, but I can’t go out on the road to sell a book with my face in the crotch.”

So Warner Books went back to press with a new back cover immediately, in advance of my road trip. Kaminsky never forgave me, even when the book did go on to sell millions. (I’ll never know if this was my temper tantrum, the arrogance of my daring to give him an ultimatum, or my insensitivity in interrupting the football game.) Years later, when I noticed a few of the original paperbacks floating around used-book stores with my face emerging from that crotch, I was told that rather than shred the offending edition, it had been sent overseas to be sold in PXs. (War did not break out that year, so I cannot be blamed.)

Kaminsky said he was shocked the MTA could be bullied into ripping down the “tastefully provocative” posters that had cost him eight thousand dollars.

“I’m shocked and disappointed, too,” I said, having been reached in Chicago by the
Post
. “If the MTA is worried about filth, let them clean up the dirty subway cars.”

Back in New York, I persuaded WCBS to send a cameraman with me into the subway. “I’ll show you filth,” I said to the camera as I led the way into the scabrous underground. “What about these hemmorhoid ads? And look at that poster with a man pulling down a woman’s slip strap. It’s obscene if it’s a woman unzipping a zipper, but it’s okay if it’s a man undressing a woman.”

My indignant five minutes ran on WCBS twice that day, at six o’clock and again on the eleven o’clock news. Half a million copies moved out of bookstores in a week. Months later, Ross Wetzsteon took a thoughtful look at
Blue Skies
in the
Village Voice
. It was my first, maybe my only, serious review.

When the book’s respectable ride on the
Times
best-seller list got me a huge advance on my next novel,
Doctor Love,
I could easily have afforded that three-bedroom apartment at the Dakota, the one I didn’t buy, as it turned out. I decided I should have a mink, and instead of my initials embroidered into the lining, I asked the furrier to put “Blue Skies, No Candy” in royal blue, with a bright red comma. I might have taken a leave from
New York
or quit, taken advantage of the momentum, written the new novel quickly instead of taking five summers. But I was afraid. Afraid I might never have another publishing bonanza and I would lose the apartment. Afraid I would dissolve and disappear and editors would stop calling to ask my recipe for grilled eggplant or how to cure marital boredom or what I was reading at the beach that summer. I was a shallow and vulnerable woman.