The United States of Arugula (13 page)

As such, Claiborne came along at a propitious time, when Americans were ready to up their game in the kitchen, to go beyond the mere “maintenance cooking” of harried housewives. His hiring by the
Times
, Ephron says, “was an amazing moment, a symbolic moment—the whole way the old food section was reinvented for the upper-middle-class reader. If you think about it, all newspaper food sections are unjustifiable journalistically. A lot of what they do is just recipes.
The Times
found a way to stay in food journalism without sullying themselves. Craig did all this stuff on the French chefs, and he also threw all his muscle behind the idea that food could be inexpensive and ethnic.”

Claiborne wasted little time in setting himself apart from the pack. While journalists like Joseph Wechsberg and A. J. Liebling had written about food in a memoirist vein, recounting this transcendent meal and that eccentric
tavernier
for
The New Yorker
, Claiborne treated food as a journalistic beat, a daily responsibility to sniff out what was going on in America’s more creative kitchens. “Craig Claiborne spent as much time writing about home cooks as he did professionals,” says Ed Giobbi, an Italian American artist based in Katonah, New York, whose prowess at Italian cooking was captured in several
Times
articles in the early 1960s, leading to a close friendship and, for Giobbi, a side career as a cookbook author.

Claiborne also introduced the idea of the
Times
restaurant review, an authoritative evaluation that could make or break a place. His November
1960 review of La Caravelle, among the first of the big breakaway republics from Le Pavillon (its chef, Roger Fessaguet, had worked in Le Pavillon’s kitchen, and its owners, Robert Meyzen and Fred Decré, had been Soulé’s maître d’s), proclaimed, “In one recently opened restaurant, New York has inherited an embarrassment of riches. It is an establishment of such caliber, there is an inclination to use such expressions as ‘first rank’ and ‘ne plus ultra.’ The name is La Caravelle. It is situated at 33 West Fifty-fifth Street, and it is conservative to say that there are no more than four restaurants in the city that can equal its cuisine.” Just like that, La Caravelle was on the dining map—though Claiborne, marking his turf as an expert, still expressed some reservations, namely that “the placement of the silver borders on the careless” (that hotel-school training!) and that “a restaurant of La Caravelle’s genre and deserved prestige should not admit corned beef and cabbage to the menu even on a trial basis.”

By positioning himself way above the heads of the ladies in snoods who had until recently dominated what passed for mainstream food journalism—he later proclaimed, rather unfairly, that “Clementine Paddleford would not have been able to distinguish skillfully scrambled eggs from a third-rate omelet”—Claiborne might have seemed to be setting himself up for a fall. But generally, the food-world reaction was one of cowed awe. Here was a man writing about food and cooking with the same intellect and rigor with which the
Times
theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote about Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett. Beard, who had hoped that his Californian friend Helen Evans Brown would get the
Times
job, wrote to her with palpable relief to report that Claiborne was treating him as an ally rather than a rival, and that “he is a sweetheart, really.” Brown herself applauded Claiborne’s journalistic approach, writing to Beard, “This country needs more writers who will tell the truth about food.”

The
Times
itself was slow to pick up on the magnitude of what Claiborne was doing and of the public’s interest in sophisticated cooking, eating, and dining. In 1959, having fielded several inquiries from publishers interested in doing a cookbook with the paper’s imprimatur, Claiborne sent a
memo to the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, to alert him to the situation. To his surprise, Claiborne received a response from Sulzberger’s deputy informing him that he, Claiborne, was welcome to the rights to the title
The New York Times Cook Book;
the paper simply didn’t view the project as a hot property. That would change within a few years, however, as Claiborne’s 1961 book bearing that title—an encyclopedic kitchen bible
of Joy of Cooking
dimensions but with clearer instructions and more upscale recipes—became a best seller, one that, in its various editions, has sold more than three million copies.

By 1963, Claiborne’s restaurant reviews, which to that point had appeared erratically, became a regular feature of the Friday paper. That same year, Claiborne introduced a star system to his reviews in which “one star denotes restaurants of more than routine interest, two stars denote those of superior quality, and three stars pertain to restaurants regarded as among the finest in the city.” A wallflower no longer, Claiborne had reinvented himself as an arbiter—the culmination of a long struggle, as he put it, “to stop writhing and to emerge from the straitjacket of my childhood.”

This process had begun shortly after his move to New York, when he started seeing a psychotherapist. Ironically enough, these sessions were initially bankrolled by Claiborne’s mother, the oppressive Miss Kathleen, after mother and son had had one last, epic dustup—effecting what Claiborne described as “my
final
and
total
estrangement from my mother” (italics his). Paying her then struggling son a visit in the city, Miss Kathleen took Claiborne to the theater, and, as usual, irritated him to the point of exasperation—nagging him and sitting, he later recalled, “too close to me for filial comfort.” As he dropped her off at her hotel, Claiborne could take his mother’s calculated inducements of guilt no longer (“I’m your mother and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be!”), and blurted out with unfiltered venom, “Mother, listen to me … Why must you be so eternally, so God-horribly, a
mother?”

Claiborne and Miss Kathleen never spoke to or saw each other again. But a few days after their conflagration, he received a check from her, accompanied
by a letter that said: “My darling son, I think you are ill. I want you to take this money and go to a psychiatrist.” Heeding her advice even as he cut her out of his life, Claiborne worked through his bizarre childhood, the boardinghouse, the strange Daddy frottage, the psychic vise grip of Miss Kathleen, the navy years, his dangerous, hormone-fueled meanderings through the streets of nighttime Manhattan, ogling uniformed cops. He emerged from this process a more confident man, albeit one whose resultant candor threw his
Times
friends for a loop. Whereas Jim Beard was never fully comfortable with his sexuality, not speaking of it in public and lurching from one furtive assignation to the next, Claiborne talked about sex compulsively, especially when he had a few drinks in him.

“With Craig, the pleasure of food and the pleasure of sex were all mixed up—a tremendous dinner with wonderful sauces was on the edge of sexual experience for him,” says Arthur Gelb, who was the
Times
chief cultural correspondent when Claiborne came on board and later became Claiborne’s most important ally as the paper’s “culture czar,” and, later still, its managing editor. “You can’t talk about Craig without talking about sex,” says Gelb. “He was over the top. He told me once, when we were drinking, that he and this little black kid, when they were small boys, would fool around with the farm animals. They would have sex with chickens.”

As freewheeling as he was around his intimates, Claiborne, in his capacity as a Francophile, Southern gentleman, and food editor of the
Times
, was the picture of reverence around Henri Soulé—all the more so when, a couple of years into his tenure at the paper, he decided that Le Pavillon was one of the few restaurants in New York, nay, in America, that upheld the standards of fine dining. In a calculated move to stir up some controversy, Claiborne wrote a sweeping critique of the industry that was headlined
ELEGANCE OF CUISINE IS ON WANE IN U
.
S
., and, remarkably, published on the front page of the
Times
on April 13, 1959. The lead paragraph read, “Two time-honored symbols of the good life—great cuisine in the French tradition and elegant table service—are passing from the American scene.”

It was actually a pretty shoddy piece of journalism, not up to Claiborne’s
usual standards. The argument was muddled: in the very next paragraph, Beard was quoted as saying, “This nation is more interested in preserving the whooping crane and the buffalo than in perpetuating classic cookery … We live in an age that may someday—with all justification—be referred to as the time of the decline and fall of the American palate.” So was the article also lamenting the decline of American foodways? No, the subject of cooking in specific American idioms was never broached. Was it an attack on the popularity of such dubious convenience-food advocates as Poppy Cannon, author of
The Can-Opener Cookbook
(1952), and Peg Bracken, author of the soon-to-be-published
The I Hate to Cook Book?
No, this phenomenon was never mentioned. Was it about the heartland’s ignorance of the riches French cuisine had to offer? No, in fact, Claiborne remarked that “oddly, while most restaurant cooking is deteriorating, the American housewife, in this time of tourist air travel, has become familiar with classic, continental cuisine. Sales of so-called gourmet foods have increased greatly.”

The piece’s main point, inasmuch as there was one, was that the age of lavish hotel dining in places like the Plaza and the Waldorf was on the wane because their chefs and waitstaff were aging and dying without adequately trained replacements waiting in the wings, and because corporate efficiency experts were cutting costs and insisting on substandard steam-tray food. Claiborne made a couple of valid points that still hold true today: that hotel food, even in luxury hotels, is unaccountably bad, and that America is severely lacking in trained, multiskilled waiters who are happy to be career waiters. He also noted the lack of educational options for aspiring chefs apart from the twelve-year-old Culinary Institute of America, then located in New Haven, Connecticut. But he was way off the mark in asserting that “French cuisine, the foundation of the world’s great dining rooms … is rapidly becoming extinct in the United States”—as he would happily discover in the next three years, when La Caravelle, Lutèce, and La Grenouille opened in rapid succession. And even as he wrote, the food at the Colony—an ex-speakeasy long known more for its café-society fizz than the quality of its fare—had already risen to near-Pavillon levels under the stewardship of
Pierre Franey’s chef friend Jean Vergnes, who’d come to New York from France in 1950.

Claiborne’s “Elegance of Cuisine” article succeeded in further setting him apart from the nicey-nice lady food journalists, though its ultimate significance was not reportorial but historical: it’s what caused Claiborne to meet Pierre Franey. By the mid-fifties, Franey had succeeded Le Pavillon’s head chef, Cyrille Christophe, an old-timer who had fallen victim to the occupational hazards of burnout and drunken misanthropy. Claiborne, needing some kind of illustration for his piece in the
Times
, telephoned Soulé, explained the article’s premise, and asked if he might bring a photographer over to capture Le Pavillon’s chef in action. Soulé agreed, and a sequence of photos captured the thirty-eight-year-old Franey, identified in the caption as “one of the few young European chefs left in the U.S.,” as he stuffed a striped bass with sole mousse, baked it, and finished it with champagne sauce.

Claiborne attended the photo shoot, shook hands with Franey, and the two men—the same age, both small-town boys, both propelled to success in New York by their love of French cookery—quickly hit it off. Before long, Franey was accompanying Claiborne on his restaurant rounds, offering an insider’s critique of what emerged from the city’s kitchens; and allowing Claiborne to hang around in Le Pavillon’s kitchen for hours at a time.

Meeting a reporter was a new experience for Franey—he had never ventured into the dining room or sought press attention. But if 1959 had countenanced the notion of celebrity chefs, he would have been the biggest, with a regular slot on the
Today
show and a book deal. He oversaw not only Le Pavillon’s kitchen, but also that of a second restaurant Soulé had opened the previous year, La Côte Basque. The newer restaurant, named in sentimental tribute to Soulé’s home turf, with custom-painted wall murals to match, was actually located in the East Fifty-fifth Street location where Le Pavillon had been until 1957; Le Pavillon itself had moved to 111 East Fifty-seventh Street in 1957 after a protracted battle of wills between Soulé and Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, which had acquired the Fifty-fifth Street building in 1955. It was a true clash of the titans: the snobbish,
anti-Semitic Soulé didn’t want his café-society customers to have to look at Cohn, whom he considered an uncouth Jewish vulgarian, so he gave Cohn bad tables at Le Pavillon even though he knew full well that Cohn was his landlord. The notoriously foul-tempered Cohn, who reveled in his reputation as the most hated man in Hollywood, effectively gave Soulé the boot by nearly tripling his rent. Unbowed, the defiant Soulé marched Le Pavillon up to its new home on Fifty-seventh and Park, and then, after Cohn died the following year, seized upon the opportunity to open La Côte Basque in the old space (albeit at a significantly higher rent than he’d paid before). Soulé posited La Côte Basque as a lower-priced, slightly less formal restaurant than his flagship, “my Pavillon for the poor.” But, just as Daniel Boulud would discover forty years later when he opened Café Boulud as a homespun alternative to the elaborate Daniel, the “cheaper” place still attracted the same old crowd.
*

Running the kitchens of both Le Pavillon and La Côte Basque was taking its toll on Franey, and, to top it off, he also had to work summers at the Hedges, Soulé’s seasonal restaurant in eastern Long Island. Recognizing that “his people” retreated in the summertime to their stately homes in the quiet fishing villages known as the Hamptons, Soulé had in 1954 purchased an old inn in East Hampton that had been built in the 1700s by William Hedges.
†
(Soulé also purchased a home for himself in Montauk.) Every summer since, between July 4th and Labor Day, Franey, Roger Fessaguet, and a sizable contingent of Le Pavillon’s staff toiled at the Hedges, attending to the summer appetites of their city clientele.