A Writer's Life Read online

  The book I was under contract to finish by the 1990s, but had so far failed to deliver to my patient, anxious publisher, was to be the sequel to Unto the Sons. This last book had centered on my parents and my Italian ancestry; the sequel was supposed to be my story, an autobiographical account of my semiassimilated life as I experienced it in America during the second half of the twentieth century. I began this book in 1992, wrote and rewrote the opening section dozens of times, but never got very far with it. What blocked me, I think, was the imprecision of my persona and the fact that I did not know where to establish my story. I had no idea what my story was. I had never given much thought to who I was. I had always defined myself through my work, which was always about other people. So when I confronted the sequel, and sought a location in which to situate myself, I was hesitant. This had not been a problem in my earlier works. The main locale for Unto the Sons had been my parents’ shop. The principal location for Thy Neighbor’s Wife had been a hillside manor in Los Angeles owned by a nudist couple, John and Barbara Williamson, and shared by their extended family of eroticists. The backdrop for Honor Thy Father had been the suburban home outside San Francisco occupied by Bill Bonanno, together with his wife, his children, and his bodyguards. The fourteen-story Times building had provided the focal point for The Kingdom and the Power. The steel columns and span of New York’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, still unconnected when I began my research there in 1962, provided the foundation for my story about the agile, hard-hatted steelworkers portrayed in The Bridge. My first book, New York—A Serendipiter’s Journey, published in 1961, concentrated on neighborhoods of obscure people dwelling in the shadows of a skyscraper city.

  Since my days as a schoolboy reporter, and continuing through my ten-year career on the Times writing staff, I had been told that we in journalism were not part of the story. Where we were, who we were, and what we thought was not relevant to what we wrote. In Orwell’s chronicle, he was the main character, the first-person narrator who held everything together with his commanding voice, his I-was-there account of what it was like to be Orwell working in a French kitchen with duplicitous waiters who were bow-tied serfs and rogues; with perspiring chefs whose sweat trickled off their white toques into pots filled with gravy and soup; with itinerant tribes of dishwashers and brass polishers, mysterious men with aliases and borrowed working papers, who were sought for questioning by the authorities in their native villages and towns of Africa, Asia, or Arabia.

  Unlike Orwell, I could not write as an “insider” in the culinary world unless I pursued my onetime fantasy of becoming an owner or partner in a restaurant. A former colleague of mine at the Times, Sidney Zion, who, I think, enjoyed hanging out in restaurants as much as I did, took over as the proprietor of Broadway Joe’s restaurant in the Manhattan Theater District for a couple of years, but I think it turned out to be an uninspiring experience, and to my knowledge, he never wrote about it. Whenever I dined at Broadway Joe’s, he greeted me courteously at the door, escorted me to a fine table, and introduced me to his show business clientele, which sometimes included Frank Sinatra. But I believe that after a few years Sidney was bored with running a restaurant. He was restricted almost every night to the same place. He had to pay attention to his business, to keep an eye on the kitchen help and their pilfering tendencies, and on the bartenders, who might otherwise be offering too many free drinks to their friends. If I owned a restaurant, I assume my fate would be similar to Zion’s. I would be unable to rove around at night, would not have the option of dining each week in a variety of restaurants. I’d be confined to a single place. I might as well stay home.

  Still, I had a contract to do a book. I had signed the contract for the sequel in 1992, and I also had accepted at that time a six-figure advance from my publisher, a sum of money that was supposed to cover my operating expenses during the three-year period deemed sufficient for me to research, write, and finally deliver a manuscript to my editor that was worthy of publication and would, it was hoped, become a best-selling book. At the end of 1995, having delivered not a word to my editor—although regularly reassuring him through the mail and faxes that I was making progress—I was technically in default of the contract. The publisher could have sued me for the return of the advance, but I heard nothing from them, not even as my tardiness continued throughout 1996 and then into 1997. What saved me from being sued, I think, was my publisher’s knowledge that I had been four or five years late in delivering Unto the Sons and Thy Neighbor’s Wife, both of which became best-sellers. In any event, I was not asked to return the advance, for which I was grateful, because by the end of 1997 I had spent every dollar of it. While I was hardly destitute at the time, being able to draw upon savings from my earlier works, I knew that I could not continue indefinitely with my method of shifting from subject to subject. I must make up my mind, I told myself, hearing again the authoritative voice of my late father. I must devote myself to one topic and then finish it, be done with it—or else I’d spend the rest of my life spinning my wheels in a ditch.

  Thus motivated, I decided (albeit tentatively) that my sequel would be set in a restaurant. So I reached into my metal filing cabinet and pulled up a thick and long-ignored folder that was labeled “Restaurants—a work in progress.” This folder contained more than ninety single-spaced typed pages of notes that I had begun accumulating in the 1970s and had added to sporadically throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. My notes described much of what I had seen and overheard during my nocturnal peregrinations in restaurants; my account of the interviews I had conducted with several restaurant owners and their employees; and the many false starts and unfinished paragraphs that represented the opening chapter of my loosely defined “work in progress” about the restaurant industry. Also tucked into my folder were photocopied pages of other people’s writings about restaurants—copies of many pages from Orwell’s book were included here, and from another book I admired, Joseph Wechsberg’s Dining at the Pavillon, a biography published in 1962 about Henry Soulé, the French owner of perhaps New York’s most renowned dining establishment, located on the ground floor of the Ritz Tower on Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. With my yellow fluorescent marker pen, I had highlighted some of Wechsberg’s remarks:

  … the maître d’hotel must be a subtle compromiser, capable of soothing not only the resentment of waiters toward overbearing guests but the far more deep-seated resentment of cooks toward waiters—a resentment based on the cooks’ feeling that they do all the work and the waiters collect all the tips … the great restaurateur must be a showman, a business man, and an artist. Like a great conductor he needs both a first-rate audience and a first-rate orchestra to perform. To be able to cast a spell over his audience he must have full control over his orchestra. The experienced restaurateur builds his kitchen brigade and dining room staff just as a conductor builds various sections of his orchestra, trying to get the best experts he can afford …

  Wechsberg not only celebrated the culinary talents and business acumen of Soulé but also his organizational ability, which allowed him to maintain his standards even while dividing his time between the Pavillon and a second restaurant that he owned and operated a few blocks away, La Côte Basque, on West Fifty-fifth Street; and, during the summer months, Soulé was frequently in Long Island, overseeing his third restaurant, the Hedges. He attracted a large and faithful following wherever he happened to be without ever spending a dollar in restaurant advertising, Wechsberg emphasized; it was strictly word-of-mouth campaigning that drew crowds of diners into his orbit.

  “Elaine Kaufman doesn’t advertise, either,” I scribbled in the margin of the photocopied page of Wechsberg’s book. I further noted that in Elaine’s case, the word-of-mouth factor that had propelled her career was all the more remarkable because her restaurant was located in a working-class Upper East Side neighborhood that was very inconvenient to nearly all of her regular customers—most of whom had to travel at least ten or twenty blocks to get there—and
, moreover, the media’s restaurant reviewers had written quite negatively about the quality of her food, portraying her as New York’s doyenne of dyspepsia.

  What most bothered these reviewers, it seemed to me, was their powerlessness in influencing her business with their criticisms. She was critic-proof, so admired and appreciated by her nightly clique, to whom she was their Jewish mother and steadfast supporter, that it mattered not at all what others thought about her or her chef. I myself never found fault with the food at Elaine’s, and while I admit that such an endorsement coming from me is of little consequence, I was confident that within the ambience of Elaine’s I would find an accommodating homesite for my sequel. Even though I did not have a specific story in mind, certainly not one in which I saw myself as a central character, the restaurant offered several interesting people for me to draw upon, an eclectic nightly gathering of intellectuals and pretenders, actresses and activists; and there was the leading lady herself, Elaine Kaufman, and her personable, though at times prickly, majordomo, Nicola Spagnolo.

  I saw them as an odd couple—the rotund Elaine, 240 pounds of amiability and angst, swatched in exquisite silk frocks costing one hundred dollars a yard, and the lean, dark-haired, limber-legged Nicola, moving around the dining room, balancing trays with the grace of an adagio dancer. The two of them worked well together, though they often bickered throughout the evening while striving to keep their voices below the sound level of their customers. If in writing my sequel I used the third-person narrative form, as I had in my other books, I believed that I could channel much of what I wanted to say about the restaurant world—and my place within it as its devotee and self-appointed writer-in-residence—through my characterization of these two individuals, both of whom I could identify with and knew well enough to be able to write about interiorly, casting them as my narrators, my stand-ins for what would be my story projected through them and other people whom I might add later.

  In certain ways, Elaine reminded me of my mother. Elaine was all business, and yet a very patient and attentive listener to her customers. Her restaurant was her raison d’être, but without her as its magnate, it would undoubtedly be doomed. She had been raised within a conventional family in Queens, and from an early age was determined to cross the bridge into Manhattan. Being an omnivorous reader who had spent her after-school hours in libraries, and who enjoyed an acquaintanceship with distinguished authors through the books they had written, did not prepare her for any particular career or calling of her own, and so she sought contentment temporarily as an appreciator of talented people while she paid her rent to live within the vibrant vortex of Manhattan while working at subservient jobs on a short-term basis until she found something that she hoped would fulfill her.

  She was employed variously as a hatcheck girl, a clerk in a used-book store, and a pitchwoman selling cosmetics at the Astor Hotel’s pharmacy in the Times Square district. She worked in the stamp department of Gimbel’s Department Store in Herald Square, and as a waitress in an uptown restaurant on 116th Street and one downtown on Tenth Street. While waitressing at Portofino on Thompson Street at Bleecker in the Village, she fell in love with the owner, a Genoese gentleman named Alfredo Viazzi, who years before, as a waiter on a luxury cruise ship, had cultivated a courtly manner in an effort to impress the better-looking of the widowed women who were traveling alone in first-class accommodations. Elaine and Alfredo Viazzi lived together above the restaurant on the fifth floor of a walk-up apartment building in which the tenants included a Mafia enforcer named Vincent “The Chin” Gigante and his mother, around whom Vincent was invariably dutiful and compliant. Elaine’s affair with Alfredo ended bitterly when he became romantically involved with a stage actress, and this is what prompted her to move uptown in 1963 and, with financial help from a partner she would eventually buy out, acquire the run-down Austro-Hungarian tavern she would rename Elaine’s.

  In addition to her friends from downtown, Elaine’s uptown patrons who helped to launch her restaurant included the editor and writer Nelson Aldrich and the poet Frederick Seidel, both of whom were connected editorially with the New York-based literary magazine The Paris Review, a quarterly founded a decade earlier on the Left Bank by George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and other young American writers then living abroad. The quarterly’s contributors and supporters who were also in Paris then included the novelists William Styron, Terry Southern, and John Phillips Marquand, the latter being the first lover of a comely debutante who during the early 1950s was a regular visitor to the city—Jackie Bouvier, future wife of John F. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. Marquand told me during the 1980s that when he and Jackie had first made love in a small Left Bank hotel, she had looked up into his eyes and inquired wonderingly, in her whispery little-girl voice, “That’s it?”

  The courtesy and respect that Elaine Kaufman showed toward poets and writers in her restaurant—to say nothing of the free after-dinner drinks and the fact that she decorated her restaurant’s walls with framed photos of their faces and book jackets, correctly assuming that they would have no objection to eating and drinking in a place where they were surrounded by reminders of themselves—helped to establish Elaine’s as a highbrow tavern in a low-rent district where the blasé clientele would hardly bat an eye if on any given night they saw Elaine escorting to a table the Dalai Lama accompanied by a ghostwriter and a representative from the William Morris Agency. It was often close to dawn before she locked her doors, waiting patiently while a few of her regulars finished their nightly backgammon or card game at one of the rear tables. She rarely gambled at cards herself, or bet on sporting events, but she was busily engaged in the stock market, profiting from the wisdom she received from one of the few Wall Streeters who were part of her inner circle. In 1968, five years after opening Elaine’s, she had earned enough money from her business and stock investments to purchase the entire four-story apartment building that included her restaurant.

  Nicola Spagnolo began working for her during her second year of operation, in the spring of 1964, and he functioned as her headwaiter for the next ten years. He attended to the front tables, where he was on a firstname basis with the regular customers, and he soon knew as well as they did what they liked to eat and drink and how they wanted their food to be seasoned and served. Since dropping out of school at fourteen in his native village, located between Genoa and the French border, Nicola had followed his male relatives into the realm of restaurant service, which would become his lifelong undertaking. Beginning as a pot washer and apprentice in a local bar and patisserie, he next found seasonal work in the kitchens of resort hotels and inns extending along the beaches from Nice to Marseilles, and in winters he often signed on as a kitchen helper on cruise ships. While employed as a cook’s assistant on an Italian merchant marine vessel that was docked in Bayonne, New Jersey, in late November 1956, Nicola decided to jump ship. At the time, he was nearly thirty, a bachelor with no dependents and a carefree disposition. So he slipped away from the crew one night, hailed a taxi into Manhattan, and traveled by subway to the Bronx, where he had the name and address of an Italian compatriot whom he knew would temporarily shelter him and would eventually get him a job in one of the many New York restaurants and hotels that employed illegal aliens in their kitchens.

  A year later, still undetected by the American immigration authorities who had been notified about his defection, Spagnolo was a hireling in the kitchen of the St. Regis Hotel on Fifty-fifth Street off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Although he had not yet mastered English, his fluency in French and Spanish as well as Italian meant that he had no difficulty in communicating with the many foreign-born people who worked at the St. Regis and in the other places where he moonlighted during his offduty hours. As he continued each day to ride the subway back and forth to work between the Bronx and Manhattan, and as he enlarged upon his sense of the city through his after-hours strolls and his widening social contacts, he guessed that he was one of several hundred or maybe one of severa
l thousand fugitives who earned their keep “off the books” in the kitchens of restaurants or hotels, as well as in the factories of the Garment District and in the construction yards of the city’s five boroughs, and at numerous other job sites that were linked to the vast underground economy that flourished in New York.

  Nicola was pleased that this situation existed, having no misgivings about its being criminal or mendacious or unfair to dues-paying unionists. From what he had heard from his friends in the Bronx, the margin of profit in the restaurant business was so small, and the operating costs and various risks involved were so high, that if the bosses were to adhere strictly to the law—that is, hire only licensed workers and pay them according to union standards—it would drive most restaurateurs into bankruptcy.

  What would also lead them toward bankruptcy, unless they could control it better than the St. Regis’s executives seemed to be doing, was the employees’ habit of stealing food, liquor, and other commodities out of the kitchen and elsewhere in the hotel with such brazenness and regularity that Nicola was certain that there would soon be a crackdown and the entire workforce, including himself, would be discharged and maybe prosecuted in a court of law. Still, the workers’ prodigious purloining of food supplies and numerous other portable items went on with impunity, week after week, month after month; what amazed Nicola most of all about it was how casually and openly the workers indulged in their larcenousness, how unafraid they seemed to be about being caught while looting the larder, the pantry, the freezer, and the liquor cabinet. They even spoke aloud among themselves about what they planned to take home after work, never defining it as stealing, but using instead a euphemism—“valising.” They would ask one another, “What are you going to valise tonight?” They customarily referred to a coworker as a “valise”: “Who’s that new valise the chef just hired?”