Insatiable (6 page)

8

H
OW
I B
ECAME
H
ENRI
S
OULÉ’S
D
ARLING

A
FTER A TIME, IT BECAME CLEAR THAT I WAS AVOIDING CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
of Craig’s favorite, Le Pavillon, creation of the quintessential Henri Soulé. I just didn’t have the courage to walk up unknown and unrecommended to the legendary martinet at his podium as he rationed out the royal banquettes at Le Pavillon. I knew from reading
Women’s Wear Daily
and Wechsberg’s
Dining at the Pavillon
how his glance could turn a poseur to
fleur de sel.
And the two of us—thanks to Don’s boyish look and my bargain-basement Ohrbach’s couture—were clearly not to the Pavillon born, unlike Jack Kennedy (who got his milk served in an ice bucket). I did not want to be hustled off to the dark nethers of Soulé’s Siberia and be fed last week’s lamb chops. It would have helped if we could have been introduced by a regular, someone to vouch for us in our untitled, un-best-dressed, un-Dun & Bradstreet shabbiness. But there was no one.

Finally, I realized the way to reach Monsieur Soulé was through my typewriter. I had started freelancing so that our fancy eating would be tax-deductible. I proposed a story to
Ladies’ Home Journal
: “A Week in the Kitchen of the Pavillon.” Henri Soulé, a flirtatious five-foot-five cube of amiability, was willing. Pouting and posing, an owl who saw himself as an osprey, he instructed his chef, Clément Grangier, to suffer me in the kitchen below for as long as required. I arrived each morning in my tennis shoes, was taught how to flute a mushroom, watched chef Grangier whisk butter to order for a fussy habitué, marveled at the saucier’s iron right forearm, and took lessons in
quenelles de brochet
—the delicate whipped pike and cream dumplings that were my favorite dish.

One Friday, Soulé invited me to lunch with him at 3:00
PM.
“Say you want
les tripes à la mode de Caen,
” he commanded. “It’s forbidden by my doctor. That damn Grangier won’t even serve it to me.” He instructed chef Grangier to hand-chop his usual hamburger. When our food had been dished up from the copper casseroles, and the captain and waiter had backed away in respectful obeisance, Soulé switched plates, generously alloting me a plop of tripe alongside my burger.

I stared at the tripe, a scary nest of anatomical parts in a muddy sauce. It would be a while before my aversion to tripe would evolve into a passion for tripe in all its guises. I didn’t have a lot of aversions in the dawn of my gourmand life, but enough that I felt I would have to conquer them. Beets made me gag. I didn’t eat olives. I hadn’t yet fallen in love with oysters. The worship of caviar escaped me. I had acquired an unDetroiterly passion for sweetbreads but had not mastered brains. I speared the tiniest nubbin of tripe on my fork, doused it heavily with sauce, and swallowed it whole. “Hmmm,” I said.

Soulé looked up, fork balanced en route to his mouth. “So you are writing about the secrets of Le Pavillon. You won’t find the secret of Le Pavillon in the kitchen,” he said. “The secret of Le Pavillon . . .
c’est moi.
” He puffed up his pouter-pigeon chest. “Le Pavillon,
c’est moi.
”

In May of 1965, Soulé announced he would reopen La Côte Basque, which he had sold in a fit of pique to a confrere who, alas, simply wasn’t making a go of it. There was talk of bankruptcy. To recover the unpaid debt, Soulé would have to repossess and run it himself. He had always thought of La Côte Basque as “Le Pavillon for the poor. A place for a man to bring his mistress while he comes with his wife to Le Pavillon.”

Don had left the
Post
by then and was happier than he had ever been, caught up in the excitement of the
Herald Tribune,
where he edited Jimmy Breslin and a young red-haired southern fellow named Tom Wolfe, whose prose had a way of ricocheting out of control. I’d quit the
Post
at Don’s urging to work full-time on a novel that grew so thorny and dense, I was finally forced to abandon it. I needed my freelancing for magazines more than ever to justify my existence and help finance our gourmandlich wanderings. Don encouraged me to offer the Soulé story to Clay Felker, an editor at
New York,
the
Trib
’s Sunday magazine. Clay, and Shelly Zelaznick, orchestrating amazing flights of unleashed journalism, had everyone talking. My docudrama of the countdown to the celebrity-riddled opening lunch was important; Soulé told me later, “The
Ladies’ Home Journal
is okay, but the
Trib
. . . that means something to Soulé. Now you must come often. You and your husband. This is your home.”

He lighted up a cigar. I lighted up a cigar. We puffed away.

About that cigar: After five sessions with the hypnotist, I had stopped smoking on New Year’s Eve. Ten days later, Don bought me an exquisite tortoiseshell and ivory cigarette holder he’d found in a small antiques shop. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I wanted desperately not to smoke again. “You didn’t notice I’m not smoking?” I asked.

“You can smoke little cigars,” Don suggested. “You don’t inhale cigars.” He had begun smoking long, thin cigars for the gestures, I thought, and the worldly ceremony. He brought home a small box of pencil-thin Schimmelpennicks, that just fit into the delicate holder.

When Soulé lighted a cigar after our next lunch, I pulled out my little box of small Dutch cigars, slipped one into the mother-of-pearl mouth of my holder, and let Soulé light it. He was delighted.

“I love a woman who smokes cigars,” he had said. He insisted I let him fill my purse with small Cuban cigars whenever I came to Le Pavillon. A small stockpile of these hoarded Cubanos found their way to Don’s humidor. I never really liked that awful cigar taste in my mouth. I gave them up after a few months because I didn’t want to smell like my uncle Max.

I loved those gossipy lunches, the unfolding intrigue of the food establishment, Monsieur Soulé’s indiscreet confessions. The lies certain people told to get a reservation when Soulé insisted he was booked. The cosmetic titan who would stop short and refuse to budge if Soulé tried to lead him to a table beyond a certain line in the carpet. The great beauty who had so much to say to her walker and nothing to say to her husband. That’s how it was in the fall of 1968, when Felker beckoned me to the new
New York
. I had one foot in my kitchen and a finger already in the Manhattan dining stew. So maybe Clay’s casting was prophetic. I might not know enough to criticize anyone’s rack of lamb or floating island in
New York
magazine, but I definitely had the requisite hunger.

9

W
HEN
C
RAIG
C
LAIBORNE WAS
G
OD AND
K
ING

C
RAIG CLAIBORNE WAS A GOD, MY HERO, MY IDOL. EVEN NON-FOOD-
obsessed New Yorkers looked to his Friday restaurant review in the
New York Times
as gospel. Don would go out to pick up the early edition of Friday’s
Times
at eleven o’clock on Thursday night and drop into his big green club chair to study what news had been deemed fit to print by the competition.

I sat on the floor at Don’s feet—we were always in the same few square feet of space in those early days. (Actually, I liked typing on the floor, my old Royal upright sitting on an atlas, my legs folded Indian-style.) Never mind the headlines, for years I had turned immediately to see what Craig loved or hated. I would give anything, I often thought, to live his life, being paid to eat, being sent overseas with unlimited funds to explore exotic cuisines. I lived his life vicariously through his writing. Craig was always going off to France. He was among the first to hit the dumpling parlors of Beijing when Nixon opened China. He even braved Vietnam during the war, oblivious to politics, properly focused on what to eat on the lemongrass trail.

Restaurant criticism was not the raucous gang bang it has become. There were not swarms of critical gullets in media yet to be invented. And Zagat had not marshaled amateur critics and built their bleats and raves into a media empire. Every New Yorker over the age of six did not consider him or herself a restaurant critic as we do today. True, James Beard had a syndicated food column. There was Clementine Paddleford writing about food in the
Herald Tribune.
And the
Post
had a pathetic column lauding restaurants that advertised in its pages.

I felt a deep, spiritual connection to Craig—fussy, uptight southerner that he seemed to be, he was unabashedly passionate about food. Before Julia, and even after, I used his first
New York Times Cookbook.
His recipes were so modest and plain and undemanding, rarely more than half a page in the book or a paragraph on the
Times
food page, unlike Julia’s meticulous, detailed, hand-holding gastrotherapy.

Cooking his recipes was as close as I could get to Craig. His
boeuf bourguignon,
redolent with red wine and caramelized shallots, was a guaranteed triumph.
Redolent
was a Craig word. And the shallot to me was a new, sophisticated onion, unheard of in my mom’s primitive Detroit pantry.

Once when the sour cream curdled in a baked zucchini recipe clipped from the
Times
and followed religiously, I dialed the newspaper and asked for counsel. I was stunned when he took the call. Himself. Craig Claiborne, with that Mississippi drawl. “Sour cream will break up if the temperature is too high,” he said. Of course. How naïve could I be? In my haste, I’d turned the flame too high. My respect for Craig, the
New York Times,
and sour cream swelled like a popover.

I was a stalker. Not literally (although it might have been a kick going through Craig’s garbage), but I did follow in his footsteps, trailing his stars. I was nervous stepping into Pearl’s, the midtown den where the smartly dressed Pearl Wong ruled haughtily over her loyal clan of Time, Inc., and Seventh Avenue pets (some of them her financial backers). Word had it that she was a master of snobbery, as arrogant as any French restaurateur. But Craig loved chef Lum’s mythic lemon chicken and yook soong, the chicken-water chestnut-red pepper mix to eat wrapped in iceberg lettuce leaves. So I went early one day all by myself, before the lunch wave hit, Craig’s review in hand. The maître d’ looked as if he wanted to refuse me a table. I berated myself for not spending more money on shoes. But since the room was an empty sea of white, I got a tight little two-top table and ordered everything Craig had singled out for praise in his review—all the spicy, peppery, gingery, chili-detonated stir-fries he loved.

“Very spicy,” the waiter warned as he took my order.

“I like spicy. Give me Craig Claiborne spicy,” I said. I dropped a chopstick load of Szechuan beef with bits of tree ear and lotus root into my mouth and gasped. Oh yes. It was spicy. The shrimp was a killer, too. I choked and sneezed and coughed, tears running down my face.

“Something wrong, lady?” the maître d’ asked.

“No,” I said, wiping my cheeks and my forehead. “It’s wonderful. It’s perfect.”

I had to find a way to meet Craig. I was more than just a fan, after all. I was a writer. I would write a profile of the great
Times
critic. How could Claiborne resist? I pitched the idea to an editor at
Look
magazine and he gave his blessings. Craig seemed amused, even pleased, by the idea of a profile in
Look
. He agreed I should start by coming along on a reviewing lunch to see how he did it. We met downtown in the Village at a funky little Spanish restaurant. Craig was fussy and proper and very southern, just like he sounded in the
Times,
scolding the waiter in his soft, rolling drawl because the plates weren’t warmed.

I tried not to seem gauche. “Oh yes,” I said, feeling the plate with the back of my hand as if it were a loved one’s fevered brow. We were the only customers in this little joint with its one waiter. I am sure he had never heard of warming plates, but he warmed them.

I was deeply impressed by Craig’s seriousness. He told me how he had suffered that week, agonizing over the stars he awarded—very rarely four, but sometimes three, many twos, and often one. “I was up all night, tossing and turning, trying to decide if I’d given the Gaiety Delicatessen three stars instead of two because [his bosses] Abe Rosenthal and Arthur [Gelb] like the Gaiety. Or does the place deserve it?” He crinkled his nose as if to say, Silly, isn’t it? All that fuss over a deli. But I could hear the anguish in his voice.

Craig thought it was important for me to see the yin and yang of his territory as a critic. He’d long ago given three stars to Quo Vadis, a clubby, upper-crust spot in the Continental style, and he thought I should taste its superior food. There was much racing about with platters of the daily specials to tempt him. At his side on the banquette, I basked in the aura of such unctuous ooze. Would Mr. Claiborne like that sautéed in butter? No butter. Olive oil? A new oil has just arrived from Tuscany, smuggled in by a cousin. (No one spoke of virgins or extra-virgins in those simpler, less promiscuous times.) A little puddle was poured so Craig could taste. He ignored it.

The tame old-world edible feel-good stirred up by the two Parma-born partners, Gino Robusti and Bruno Caravaggi, bred intense fidelity from Quo Vadis loyalists, I learned. There were the musical Italians—Tebaldi, Corelli, Tucci. On the day of an opera performance, Cesare Siepi would put away a dozen and a half oysters. Quo Vadis habitués were likely to witness such affectionate reunions as Gen. George C. Kenney embracing Mrs. Douglas MacArthur at a table with Eddie Rickenbacker, John Paul Getty and a scion not talking much, and Baron Rothschild rinsing his hands with water from a goblet. The house was known for a few Belgian and Italian signature dishes—the eel in green sauce, a heroic
bollito misto
(boiled meats with a spunky salsa verde and candied mustard fruits)—and for subdued classics like bay scallops meunière or a wholesome calf’s liver with bacon, nutritional sanity for the Geritol set, sexagenarian capitalists, and aging warriors.

Gino and Bruno danced their pas de deux for Craig now in the antimacassar parlor elegance of chintz and crystal and clichéd bronzes on marble pedestals below the fabulous painted palazzo ceiling. I was wowed by the fondue Bruxelloise—deep-fried batter-wrapped pockets of creamy cheese, sprinkled with a shock of fried parsley. But I noticed that Craig seemed seriously disturbed by his
anguille au vert
—eel poached in white wine and mulched in fresh herbs. “It needs salt,” he said. I tasted. Indeed. When Craig grabbed a salt shaker and corrected the lapse, I could see both owners go white.

A shallow copper cocotte of kidneys Bercy was presented for Craig’s nod, sauceboat alongside.

“Enough,” Craig said as Gino dished them out. “Enough. No, that’s too much.” He frowned. And to me: “So gross.”

Too much? Gross? I never knew there could be anything like too much. Too much was always just barely enough for me. But Craig ate very sparingly—savoring each morsel if it were properly seasoned and skillfully cooked. And the kidneys were splendid that day. He closed his eyes and smiled beatifically. He nibbled and sipped his wine, leaving a third of the kidneys on his plate, as if he was actually full. Full, that was another new concept for me. Life was never about full. It was about “Oh my god, how delicious this is.” I would soon realize it was drinking that gave Craig his neat little potbelly. He loved his martinis, fine wine in beautiful crystal, and, oh, those margaritas (only fresh-squeezed lime would do for his perfect margarita). I wrote down the recipe, looking forward to thrilling my friends at my next brunch with the perfect margarita.

Look
’s photographer and I drove out to Craig’s weekend house on Long Island to shoot him and onetime Pavillon chef Pierre Franey preparing a recipe for their Sunday
Times
magazine column. I was beside myself with anticipation—Craig Claiborne and the great Pavillon chef cooking for me. Craig lived in a modest two-story prefab that he’d bought from a catalog and parked alongside a modest pool with great views of Gardiner’s Bay in the Springs, that low-frills exurb of East Hampton where so many painters worked, not far from where Jackson Pollock was buried.

As a devotee of what soup opera got covered in the very staid
New York Times,
I knew Pierre Franey had stunned Manhattan’s close-knit colony of Gallic expatriates by quitting the mythic Le Pavillon (the ultimate great restaurant of its time). He’d felt slighted by Soulé and left for Howard Johnson’s and more money, where, Craig reported to me, he was contentedly upgrading the canned gravy and stews, and was the genius behind HoJo’s ginger ice cream. Was Howard Johnson’s coffee ice cream uniquely brilliant? It was, I learned, because Pierre had insisted they use espresso coffee. Indeed, Claiborne-Franey recipes occasionally might call for a can of Howard Johnson’s gravy, a veritable sauce espagnole by any other name.

Pierre had been the invisible eminence in Craig’s recipes for a long while and ultimately came to share the byline on their Sunday column. On this afternoon, he bustled about Craig’s open kitchen—a sturdy, suntanned Frenchman, fiftyish and sexy, with emphatic black brows and that flirtatious manner that seems to run in French genes. His intimates and maybe the world knew that Craig was gay, and everyone not in their immediate circle of intimates wondered if Pierre was gay, too. It was clear to me that Craig adored him. Pierre stabbed some lobsters, flamed them in cognac, and began to create a soufflé Plaza Athénée—the classic layering of lobster and grated Gruyère with cream and whipped egg whites that would balloon in the oven and brown into a glorious cloud.

Craig stationed himself on a stool at the counter in front of his portable typewriter, counting the eggs as they cracked and occasionally grabbing Pierre’s hand so he could measure how much flour or how much salt the chef was about to toss into the bowl.

As dinnertime neared, Craig began pouring Dom Pérignon into Baccarat crystal flutes for all of us. Still freshly hatched and an ingenue in the world of the grape, I was not used to drinking from a flute. The fragile crystal in my bridal trousseau included saucer goblets for champagne. (I’d grown up with the myth that a perfect breast would fit into a champagne goblet, and mine were embarrassingly Burgundy balloons. Certainly the flute banished that conundrum.)

Betty Franey arrived with the three little Franeys. I figured they were all haute chowhounds. “Oh, if only,” she said. Jacques, at five, would eat only canned SpaghettiOs and hot dogs, she confided. She flashed me a quick glance of the Entenmann’s chocolate cake hidden in her bag for the kids’ dessert. “Don’t let Craig know,” she whispered. “He’d have a fit.” I didn’t see what the children did with their soufflé. Maybe they didn’t get any. Maybe they hid it under a leaf of lettuce. There were two billowing, glazed, picture-perfect poufs—one for the five of them, one for me and the photographer—each bite a savory surprise, every mouthful different: a fragrant fluff cloaking a chunk of lobster, an ooze of cheese-scented cream, or a pungent patch sporting a crunch of crusted Parmesan. It was as complex as T. S. Eliot on the plate.

After dinner, Craig was still pouring, cognac and brandy now. He played recordings of Broadway musicals from a huge collection of everything I’d ever heard of, played them loud, and when
West Side Story
began, he had to dance. “Maria. Maria, Maria.” He knelt at my feet, acting it out. He danced with me and then he danced off alone. And when he tumbled down the spiral staircase, blood running from a cut on his head, he laughed as if delighted. He’d drunk enough to blur the pain.