The United States of Arugula (45 page)

James Villas, who lived near both men in East Hampton and received a play-by-play account of the fracas from the involved parties, recalls, “Craig was demanding more and more and more of Pierre’s time. And I can certainly understand Betty’s position. Craig was screaming and hollering and really trying to get Pierre to work, and he got particularly drunk. I can’t
tell
you what Craig was like when he was drunk! Oh, the times he crashed into my trees and didn’t know where he was going! He was a
bad
drunk. And he blew up and let Betty have it, and she gave it right back to him. From that moment on, the schism really was established between Pierre and Craig.”

Looking back, Villas believes that “at the very beginning, at least, Craig was in love with Pierre. And I think Betty always thought that was true, and that got to be ugly.” Miller confirms that “a lot of people thought that Craig and Pierre were an item. I think it bothered Pierre a little bit. Back then, you would see Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey together, and, you know, half the food writers were gay, so people just made that assumption. I can’t tell you how many times I had to disabuse people of that.”

Betty Franey will only say that her husband “was glad to get away from Craig, to tell you the truth, because he was so cranky. When the
Times
said, ‘Okay, let Bryan do the byline,’ that was a big relief.” Franey continued to do the “60-Minute Gourmet” column all the way until 1994, and in his sixties, by which time his hair had turned all white, he emerged as a cuddly, telegenic PBS chef, starring in a cooking program called
Cuisine Rapide
, which yielded a best-selling tie-in book written with Miller.

“Pierre was the most completely content, happy man,” says Miller. “He
started out cooking when he was fourteen, and his life was to serve others. When he got behind the stove, something happened to him. He whistled—he always whistled when he was cooking. He loved his métier, he loved the people in the business, and I never heard anyone ever say an ill word about him.”

Alas, Claiborne’s descent into lonely, inebriated misery in the eighties was tragic—a descent exacerbated by the auto-crash death in 1986 of his sort-of companion, Henry Creel, and the poor sales and reception of his memoir,
A Feast Made for Laughter.
Published in 1982, a good decade before frank confessionals and psychosexual drama became the norm in contemporary nonfiction, the book laid out his memories of his nocturnal “explorations” of his father’s body and his simmering contempt for his mother—and then, in the back, there were recipes for grapefruit sherbet and Jean Vergnes’s seafood crepes. “People were interested in him food-wise; they didn’t want to hear all that family business,” says Betty Franey. “That was a mistake. Pierre felt bad about that.”

His palate shot to hell by booze, his stamina reduced by bypass surgery, Claiborne was no longer the inexhaustibly curious culinary adventurer of yore, “and his writing deteriorated terribly,” says Miller. “It got so bad that the desk wrote it. It was like staccato notes. Very sad, very sad.” In a replay of the events of 1972, Claiborne also became consumed by the notion that the world hadn’t given him his due, and that the
Times
had somehow done wrong by him.

“There was a hairpin turn into bitterness,” Arthur Gelb recalls, and Claiborne huffily severed relations with the paper in 1988. He continued to accept assignments from other publications, notably
Food Arts
, a high-end publication founded in 1989 by Michael and Ariane Batterberry (the same urbane New York couple who, eleven years earlier, had founded
Food & Wine
magazine), but his output was meager, and his capabilities were limited. In a depressing letter to the chef Barry Wine of the acclaimed restaurant Quilted Giraffe, Claiborne requested an interview for
Food Arts
but cautioned, “To do this, for better or for worse, it would be necessary for you to
come into my home for the talk. Because of an arthritic thumb, I cannot write in longhand.”

Drew Nieporent remembers that in 1986, shortly after he’d opened Montrachet with the chef David Bouley, he received a call from Michael Tong of Shun Lee Palace, an innovative Chinese restaurant that Claiborne had championed. “He said, ‘Craig’s in the hospital, he’s gonna be having some operation, and he would really love you guys to cook for him one night,’” Nieporent says. “So David Bouley and I collaborated on a menu. And the day that we were doing this, there was a blizzard. It was so bad that we actually closed the restaurant—and yet David and I still showed up for work. I said to David, ‘Should we do this for Craig Claiborne?’ And he said, ‘I can do it if you can get the food to him.’ So we did this beautiful meal. I somehow got a cab. The hospital was all the way uptown, and I remember climbing over snowdrifts with all this food and beautiful silverware. I knocked on Craig’s door, and he said, ‘You can put the food right over there.’ We chatted for a little bit, and then he said, ‘Well, I’m not feeling very well, so I’m gonna ask you to leave.’ So I went out into the hallway, and, while I was waiting for the elevator to come, I looked over, and there was Craig Claiborne with the tray in his hands. And he turned to a nurse and said
[Southern accent]
, ‘Ah can’t eat this shit! Can you get rid of this shit?’”

Claiborne somehow hung on all the way to the year 2000, though by then he had long been confined to a wheelchair and was behaving irascibly even toward the most loyal members of his dwindling circle of friends, which included Jacques Pépin, Ed Giobbi, and Villas. In the early nineties, Villas stopped by Claiborne’s home, he says, “just to make sure he was alive.” Finding no one there, he left a note saying he’d stopped by. A few days later, Villas received a pissy letter from Claiborne explaining that he’d been away. “Why don’t you telephone me before you stop by?” Claiborne wrote. “It would be much more practical for both of us. Jean Stafford once had a note posted outside her kitchen and living room doors which said to the effect, ‘Anyone who stops by here without prior notice will be humiliated.’”

“That hurt me terribly,” says Villas. “But then I thought about it and
realized, ‘He’s not himself.’” In Claiborne’s last days, Villas wheeled America’s preeminent food journalist to one of the few restaurants he cared to eat in anymore: the Fifty-seventh Street location of the Planet Hollywood chain, which was near his Manhattan apartment. Claiborne liked the club sandwich there.

Franey actually predeceased Claiborne by almost four years, but his final decade was much fuller and happier. His
Cuisine Rapide
success begat still more PBS series,
Pierre Franey’s Cooking in America
and
Pierre Franey’s Cooking in France
, and he never tired of teaching. Well into his seventies, he still got a kick from doing cooking demonstrations, for the fun of it as much as for the money. He had just finished doing one such demonstration, aboard the
Queen Elizabeth 2
, when he suffered the stroke that took his life in 1996.

“Their relationship was absolutely symbiotic—they needed each other,” says Villas of Franey and Claiborne. “God, the days that I sat there and saw the entire scenario: Pierre, probably the greatest cook in my lifetime, over at the stove, and Craig, sitting at the typewriter with his half-glasses on, with a certain angst about him. I can hear him now: ‘How many cups? No, not
about
how many,
exactly
how many?’ And Pierre, never, ever getting fazed. I don’t think I was really aware of what I was seeing there, and how important it was. Cooking and dining and eating values were being created as I was watching. Because it would all go into
The New York Times.”

THE DRAWN-OUT DENOUEMENT
of Claiborne’s life served him poorly for posterity. By the time he passed on, few people under the age of fifty had any sense of his mammoth contribution to America’s eating habits, or even of who he was. James Beard, on the other hand, was an exalted figure until the day he died, in January of 1985, at the age of eighty-one. Certainly, his final decade was not without its unsavory aspects. He developed crushes on unattainable or exploitative young men. He had a mirror installed above the bed in his salmon-walled boudoir, and relished the opportunities his circulatory problems gave him to have young men kneeling at his feet, binding his
lower legs with bandages while his robe fell open. He had a penchant for setting various members of his court against one another, taking wicked delight in watching, say, the sharp-taloned New Yorker Barbara Kafka (“a very difficult bitch,” says Michael McCarty, admiringly) run roughshod over the timorous, self-effacing Marion Cunningham. Most painfully for Beard personally, he became involved in 1983 in a plagiarism scandal when a book to which he’d given a promotional blurb,
Richard Nelson’s American Cooking
, by a Portland cooking teacher with whom he’d worked, was found to contain recipes lifted almost verbatim from other cookbooks, most notably Richard Olney’s
Simple French Food.
(Olney took legal action and settled with Nelson, but he never forgave Beard.)

But Beard died a beloved, wanted man, surrounded by friends and protégés keen to perpetuate his legacy. As he lay on his deathbed in New York Hospital in early 1985, finally succumbing to all those years of animal fats and Glenlivet, he was attended to by his various devotees in the food world, among them Kafka, Forgione, Clark Wolf, John Ferrone, Judith Jones, Paul Kovi and Tom Margittai (the managing partners of the Four Seasons at the time), and the cooking teacher Peter Kump.
*
When Beard died, it was Kump who arranged the purchase of the West Twelfth Street town house from Beard’s main beneficiary, Reed College of Oregon,
†
for the newly formed James Beard Foundation, of which he was the founding president.

“Jim very much believed that he’d rather die at eighty and eat everything he wanted than live to ninety not having salt and sugar and desserts and Scotch,” says Forgione, who was the last visitor to see Beard alive, and whose friendship with Beard was perhaps the most purely food-oriented, with no undercurrent of lust or exchanges of vicious food-world gossip. “Jim was just this warm, wonderful guy, and we wanted to keep him happy,” Forgione says. “Everybody knew that the Four Seasons was doing his dinners in the hospital, and I’m certainly guilty of having sneaked Glenlivet to him.”

Beard would go on to enjoy a fulfilling, sanitized afterlife as the patron saint of American culinary values—an oft-quoted, reverently invoked folk deity like Will Rogers or Vince Lombardi. But the West Twelfth Street town house, which Beard never cared for in the first place, couldn’t shake off its bad karma, not even after the death in 1990 of its unwanted tenant, Gino Cofacci. The Beard Foundation was, from the get-go, amorphous of intent, with Kump proclaiming that its goal was “to gain recognition for the culinary arts as a bona fide art form.” In practical terms, no one was quite sure what this meant. The foundation charged steep membership fees and hosted lavish events at the town house (now officially known as Beard House) in which acclaimed chefs cooked multicourse showcase meals for members and their guests. The members paid a hefty per-meal fee on top of their annual dues—as much as $150 a head—and the chefs donated their services and food, the idea being that the sacrifice was worth it for the invaluable New York exposure and the good works of the foundation. Anthony Bourdain, the gadfly chef-author, famously referred to Beard House as “a benevolent shakedown operation.”

But even though Beard House packed them in, with its members dutifully putting their names on waiting lists to attend dinners prepared by whichever chef happened to be in town when a seat opened up, the foundation itself was as administratively inept as Beard himself had been. Under Kump, who died of cancer in 1995, the incompetence was benign, a matter of a cooking teacher being in over his head as an administrator.

But under Kump’s successor, Len Pickell, the fogginess of the foundation’s
mission and its shoddy accounting practices became a criminal matter. The Beard Foundation had chartered itself as a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization, on the grounds that its revenue went toward such charitable purposes as a scholarship program for aspiring culinary professionals. But an audit of the 2003 fiscal year revealed that only $29,000 of the foundation’s $4 million plus operating fund had gone toward scholarships. Pickell, though he had an authentic zeal for good food and wine, turned out to be a con man who falsely claimed to be an independently wealthy certified public accountant. In fact, he was not a CPA, had been unemployed before taking the un-salaried Beard Foundation position, lived with his wife in a middle-class New Jersey split-level, and had been financing his lavish trips, meals, and lifestyle with money stolen from the foundation. Pickell ended up going to prison in 2005 after pleading guilty to second-degree grand larceny, and the entire board of trustees was forced to resign.

Still, the Beard Foundation survives, rededicated to being an organization whose purpose is to “celebrate, preserve, and nurture America’s culinary heritage and diversity in order to elevate the appreciation of our culinary excellence,” to quote its mission statement—and, just as important, to not be just a “wine and dine society,” in the derisive words of the new head of the new board of trustees, Dorothy Cann Hamilton, who also founded New York’s French Culinary Institute. The annual James Beard Foundation Awards ceremony lives on, too, promulgating awareness not only of America’s best chefs and most promising up-and-comers but of Beard himself, whose baldheaded, bow-tied likeness adorns the medallion bestowed upon winners.

A bigger character and better aphorist than the cranky Claiborne ever was, Beard left behind enough prophecies and aperçus to keep his name in food-world circulation in perpetuity. In 1982, he said, “We are now in a new epoch of gastronomic excellence that, with a liberal seasoning of common sense, will draw on the best of old American cookery as well as on the technological advances of the new.” In late 2005, this declaration was repurposed as a fund-raising appeal, appearing atop a letter that was sent out to
Beard Foundation members as the organization sought to recover from the Pickell scandal. Below the quotation was a little box for a contributor to check and the sentence, “YES, I want to support the chefs, culinary students, and other people responsible for bringing about a new epoch in gastronomic excellence.”