The United States of Arugula (14 page)

For Franey, married with two children, the salutary effect of working at the Hedges was that it exposed him to East Hampton and prompted him to buy a small home for his family in the northern hamlet of Springs, overlooking
Gardiners Bay. It’s fair to say that he and Soulé played some role in making the Hamptons the glutted weekenders’ playground it later became. “The Hedges became a very special place for people who never even lived in the Hamptons at that point,” says Arthur Gelb. “The Hamptons were so sleepy back then. You never saw anyone, and the whole area was WASP.” But at the end of the fifties, Soulé was encountering hostility from locals who thought that his restaurant, by virtue of his and his clients’ celebrity, was attracting what Gelb characterizes as a “bohemian, homosexual, and Jewish influx from Manhattan.” The locals might have been reprehensible in their bigotry, but their demographic profiling was dead on—though Soulé himself had no great love for anyone in these categories, he was a media and society darling, and where he went, the Manhattan circus followed. Claiborne tipped off Gelb to the Soulé–East Hampton battle and to the fact that the locals were also agitating for the closing of an upstart summer stock theater on similar grounds. Early in 1960, Gelb wrote up the imbroglio for the
Times.

“The story ran on page one,” says Gelb. “The townspeople were furious that Soulé was bringing in show people and gays. In the middle of the night, they were overturning his trash cans and dumping his garbage all over the lawn. He was a proud Frenchman and he went crazy. He wept while I interviewed him. The story got a tremendous reaction, and it resulted in an apology from the town fathers.”

A few months later, it was Claiborne who had a scoop on the latest Soulé ruction—this time, between the restaurateur and Franey. Soulé, an obstinate man, had frequently done battle with his staff over wages and hours, and had endured his share of short-term walkouts. “He treated us like garbage. He was not sentimental,” says Robert Tréboux, who was a waiter at Le Pavillon in the fifties and later purchased Le Veau d’Or, a venerable French bistro on East Sixtieth Street.
*
In the spring of 1960, Soulé announced
that he was eliminating the kitchen staff’s overtime pay. Franey protested angrily, but Soulé refused to hear him out. “It was very difficult, because the French chef has to protect his workers, like the captain going down with his ship,” says Tréboux. “So Pierre left. That was it.”

Franey had been encouraged to take this action by his diminutive but tough new deputy, Jacques Pépin, a hotshot twenty-four-year-old who’d arrived in New York less than a year earlier, having worked as the personal chef to France’s president, General Charles de Gaulle. In France, Pépin explains, kitchen walkouts were so common that there was a special French phrase for the event:
la brigade saute
, “the brigade jumps.” But in New York, Pépin soon found himself cornered by a couple of oversize goons from Local 89 of the restaurant employees union, who pinned him to a wall and said, “You better watch your step, understand? Think you’re a big shot, just off the fuckin’ boat?”

Neither Franey nor Pépin ever set foot in Le Pavillon again.

Claiborne announced the Soulé-Franey split to the world with an article headlined
RESTAURANT MEN SIMMER AND MENU GOES TO POT; LE PAVILLON SHUT IN A GALLIC DISPUTE.
Reading this report, Howard Johnson, a Pavillon regular and the founder of the orange-roofed ice-cream-and-clam-roll chain bearing his name, stepped in to try to mediate between the men, but to no avail. So, instead, Johnson hired Franey as a “vice president in charge of quality control” at his corporation, with a mandate to improve the HoJo chain’s food. Soon enough, Pépin, too, was on board, again as Franey’s deputy.

For a brief period in the early 1960s, after the Pavillon exodus, mass-market American food companies subjected themselves to the intriguing experiment of letting trained French chefs tell them what to do. Franey and Pépin standardized a system wherein the filling of HoJo’s chicken potpies was thickened with a real butter-and-flour roux, and the beef bourguignonne was flavored with real (if inexpensive) Burgundy. The Campbell Soup company hired Marcel Theuil, a former Pavillon
saucier
, as a consultant and research chef. And the Stop & Shop grocery chain hired the Colony’s Jean Vergnes to devise a series of high-end heat-and-serve prepared meals for
people to purchase on their way home from work. “I used to make everything,” Vergnes says, “Coq au vin,
escalopes de veau …
They would have a life existence of one week in the Frigidaire.”

But the concept of prepared gourmet foods for the home, in that pre–Whole Foods, pre–Wolfgang Puck era, was before its time—from a corporate standpoint, anyway. While consumer reaction was positive, all of these experiments ultimately foundered on the premise that the Frenchmen’s methodologies and ingredients cost too much. Franey and Pépin lasted the longest at their jobs, for the whole of the sixties, quitting only when they felt that the younger Howard Johnson, Howard B., was failing to uphold the standards set by the elder Johnson, their benefactor, Howard D.
*

For Franey, anyway, the best part of the HoJo’s job was that he got to work normal hours, nine to five, Monday to Friday. His friendship with Claiborne, originally more of a professional acquaintanceship, intensified into a close personal bond in the early sixties. In 1962, Claiborne used the unexpected windfall from his
New York Times Cook Book
royalties to buy land and build his own house on Gardiners Bay, right near that of Franey and his wife, Betty—a house that, as the sixties advanced, became, along with the West Tenth Street town house that Beard purchased at the dawn of that decade, the major gathering place of the American food intelligentsia. Though Franey didn’t get his own byline in the
Times
until 1976, he functioned blissfully for fifteen years as “Craig’s hands,” preparing recipes that Claiborne was testing while Claiborne observed, half-glasses perched on his nose, stationed at an IBM Selectric typewriter on the kitchen counter, calling out in his Mississippi lilt, “Now, how many cups of flour was that, Pierre?”

As for Soulé, he carried on, more than creditably, with a new chef at Le Pavillon, Clement Grangier. But his final years were full of ill will and recrimination. When his maître d’s from La Côte Basque and Le Pavillon, Robert Meyzen and Fred Decré, respectively, joined forces with Franey’s loyal sous-chef, Roger Fessaguet, to start La Caravelle—which, in French, translates, more or less, as “schooner”—Soulé told the press that “The Caravelle will sink.” “We were on West Fifty-fifth Street, not east, and our customers told us he was calling us ‘the busboys of the West Side,’” says Fessaguet.

Franey saw Soulé one last time, shortly before the latter’s death. The younger man was strolling along Fifth Avenue and noticed Soulé walking in his direction. Figuring that bygones were bygones, Franey pleasantly called out, “Mr. Soulé!”

Soulé cast his eyes downward, pretending he hadn’t heard Franey. Franey kept at it, shouting, “Mr. Soulé!”—again, to no avail. By now, Franey was furious, and stalked Soulé for a city block, walking alongside him, shouting, “Mr. Soulé, look at me! Look at me! It’s Pierre!” But Soulé, stubborn and unsentimental as ever, stared ahead and walked on.

Soulé died of a heart attack on January 27, 1966. Le Pavillon straggled along for another five years under new ownership, but it was never the same. La Côte Basque, however, soldiered on under the iron hand of Soulé’s most loyal servant—his mistress, Madame Henriette—and then under the aegis of the chef Jean-Jacques Rachou, who acquired the restaurant in 1979.
*

Just eight days after Soulé passed away, Lucius Beebe, that great bon vivant, boulevardier, and
Herald Tribune
columnist, who revered Soulé as one of the last avatars of the high life he held so dear, took his ritual morning Turkish bath, toweled off, and promptly dropped dead—of a broken heart, his friends said.