A Writer's Life (14 page)

W
HILE
I
VIEWED
G
EORGE
O
RWELL AS A QUASI
-D
ANTE PORTRAYING
a purgatory of pots and pans in his book
Down and Out in Paris and London
, I saw myself as producing a
Decameron of Dining Rooms
, feasting on the tales of the customers, the restaurateurs, and their personnel, and somehow blending this material into a cohesive narrative. At first I did not approach Elaine Kaufman or Nicola Spagnolo for interviews, preferring to wait until I had a better idea of what I was doing, but I did begin keeping a restaurant journal in the 1970s, one in which I noted what I had observed and overheard during my nightly visits to Elaine's and other restaurants, and I continued this practice on and off for the next thirty years. Indeed, it was the restaurant world that I was writing about during the summer of 1999 when I saw the China-USA women's World Cup soccer match on television. The fifty-four and a half typed pages that I had then completed—and that were stacked on my desk as I took a respite from my work to spend a Saturday afternoon channel-surfing, during which time I happened upon Liu Ying's sad moment in the Rose Bowl—were pages that I had rewritten many times in the past and were distilled from two hundred other pages that I had written and thrown away.

Often I involve myself with two or three unrelated subjects at the same time, and I shift from one to another when I become bogged down and believe it wiser to put aside what I am doing and reappraise it at some point in the future. In 1974 I had begun to describe many restaurant scenes and situations that I had witnessed, but they seemed to be too fragmented and diffused. So I moved on to another subject that I had under consideration, and finally in 1979 I saw this one through to the end. It was
Thy Neighbor's Wife
—one of four books that I had begun and completed between 1965 and 1999; but during this period I had also started several other books and had finished none of them. My curiosity drives me in different directions, but until I have invested lots of my time—
months, years—I have no idea whether a chosen subject will sustain my interest. Sometimes I toss into the trash various drafts of what I have written, while at other times I put them aside, file them away, reread them a year or two later, rewrite and refile them perhaps, or decide that they are not worth saving after all, and so I tear them up and rid myself of them forever.

Writing is often like driving a truck at night without headlights, losing your way along the road, and spending a decade in a ditch. It had been much simpler when I worked as a journalist. In those youthful days I was ordered by an editor to write a certain story, was permitted a limited time in which to complete it, and, whether or not I was entirely pleased with the results, I was forced to surrender it before the deadline to the editor, who passed it on to the copyreader, after which it went to the printers, and that was the end of it until it appeared in the next edition of the
Times
. On the following day, the process was repeated.

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:

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.