A Writer's Life (63 page)
Authors: Gay Talese
There had recently been an article in the
Times
describing feng shui as a melding of certain principles in the Chinese Taoist and Tibetan Buddhist
tradition that presumably offered guidance to people wishing to experience more “energy” and “harmony” in their places of work and their residences; it was further suggested that such goals might be achieved merely by the rearrangement of furniture, the relocation of kitchens, and the removal of structural columns, overhead beams, and other objects that might limit the flow of energy. Inasmuch as Marla Maples had previously hired feng shui proponents to work with the designers and decorators of some of Donald Trump's properties, and had been pleased with the results, she invited two of them to examine the space at 206 East 63rd Street shortly after she and Bobby Ochs had acquired the sublease. Ochs told me that he had initially been skeptical about seeking advice from the feng shui women, but after showing them around and hearing their comments, and later reading their report, he realized that he was in total agreement with their recommendations. The restaurant's entranceway should be rebuilt and made “more welcoming”; the bar area should be on the second floor, not the first, thus adding space and energy to the dining room; and the pizza oven was best eliminated, being described in the report as a “money burner.” The adoption of these and other proposals would make Peaches similar in design to one of Bobby Ochs's favorite New York restaurantsâLe Colonial, a two-floored Vietnamese restaurant at 149 East 57th Street, between Third and Lexington avenues. “That place has a lively bar upstairs and a wide-open dining room below that's doing a terrific business,” he told me, becoming so enthusiastic about the possibility that Peaches might exceed Le Colonial in popularity that I was reluctant to interrupt him with the question that had drawn me here.
“Are you by any chance related to the Ochs family of the
New York Times?”
I finally asked.
“Oh, I'm often asked that,” he replied, recalling that during his boyhood in the Bronx the teachers would usually commence the school year by asking each of the students to rise in their classrooms, introduce themselves by name, and also say a few words about their parents. “Whenever I mentioned that my father was Adolph Ochs, the teacher would cut in and ask, â
The
Adolph Ochs?' and I'd say, âOf course,
the
Adolph Ochs.' âOh,' the teacher would say, âI didn't know your father owned the
New York Times,'
and I'd say, âNo, my father, Adolph Ochs, is a dental mechanic on One Hundred and Sixty-seventh Street and River Avenue.'Â ”
The two Adolphs were
not
related, Bobby Ochs told me, although he believed that his late father might be deserving of a footnote in the annals of the dental profession. His father had made the false teeth worn by the exiled Russian leader Leon Trotsky, not long before the latter had
been murdered in Mexico in 1940 by agents of Trotsky's rival, Joseph Stalin. Trotsky had passed through the United States while en route to Mexico, Ochs explained, and it was during Trotsky's brief stay in the Bronx that he had somehow become a dental patient of Bobby Ochs's father, Adolph.
I thanked Bobby Ochs for this information. Privately, however, since hearing that he was unrelated to the
Times
's ownership, I was no longer so interested in his personal story nor the fate of Peaches restaurant. I did attend the opening-night party in late September 1998, and I dined there occasionally after that, but on those occasions I never once saw Marla Maples on the premises. There
was
a large portrait of her by LeRoy Neiman hanging on the wall near the entrance, but she herself was either out of townâa
New York Post
columnist wrote that she was working on a television pilot in Los Angelesâor she was, as I also read in the papers, preoccupied in New York with matters regarding her marital breakup with Donald Trump or her litigation involving a man who had formerly served as her publicist and had allegedly stolen seventy pairs of her shoes and also some of her lingerie and panty hose.
In her absence, Bobby Ochs ran Peaches cheerfully and without apparent effort each night, and, from what I was able to observe as an occasional customer (once dining there with J. Z. Morris), the restaurant was doing well enough, although my judgment was, as usual, untrustworthy. In early May 1999, as I was passing 206 East 63rd during my usual midday stroll, I saw Bobby Ochs alone in the dining room and decided to pay him a visit.
“Sorry,” he said as I entered, “but we're closed.”
“Closed for the afternoon?” I asked.
“No, closed for good,” he said.
“I can't believe it,” I said; “you seemed to be doing fine.”
“No we weren't,” he said, “but I still don't know what I could have done differently around here. The food was good; the prices were right.⦔
He invited me to join him at one of the empty tables, and for the next hour or so he tried to analyze what had caused the downfall of Peaches. As he delivered what was essentially a monologue, his voice sometimes almost inaudible and markedly morose, I sat across from him taking notes; and, after returning home, I sent the following message by fax to J. Z. Morris in Sarasota:
Friday, May 7, 1999
Dear J.Z.â
I was just with Bobby Ochs in his now-defunct Peaches restaurant listening to him discussing the reasonsâthe how many reasons?âthat led to his having to close the place after barely seven months of operation. I think that in a mental sense he is almost shell-shocked at this time. I felt so sorry for him as he unburdened himself in this abandoned dining room that was buzzing with fliesâa forlorn atmosphere interrupted occasionally by a ringing telephone dialed by people wanting a dinner reservation, or by the door knockings of a mailman who wanted to know how much longer he should be delivering mail to Peaches at this address? There was also a visit from a young woman who had been a customer and she inquired as to the whereabouts of a man she'd often met in the bar in the upstairs lounge weeks before (she'd been smitten by him, but lost his phone number); and there also arrived at the door a now out-of-work waitress asking Bobby Ochs when she'd be receiving her promised pay? He promised that she'd receive her money on Friday evening.
Once or twice during my stay with him he received visits from rental agents wanting to see the place. So far as I could tell, Ochs has no takers; but he has not lost hope. As depressed as I think he is, he tries hard not to show it â¦Â although the clouds did seem to be very heavy and dark in this vacant restaurant today. The plants situated above the banquettes had not been watered in days, and their leaves were turning brown, and in the kitchen the garbage cans were filled with refuse. I watered the plants, and warned Bobby that rats would be visiting soon if he did not get the kitchen cleaned up. He agreed to do it. He is very agreeable and likeable. But he still wonders why he failed to make a success of this business. All he could do was list his possible shortcomings and errors in judgment; and he is not reluctant to take all the blame. Maybe, he suggests, it was wrong to have moved the bar upstairs. Maybe if the downstairs dining room had been furnished with a bar and had people gathered around it waiting for tables, the potential customers looking in from the sidewalk would have found the place more inviting and desirable. There were several other things that were mentionedâbut what did it matter now? Approximately $750,000 was invested in improving this place beyond what the Tucci owners had done; and the results were nil.â¦
A few months later, J. Z. Morris told me that yet another restaurant, a kosher Italian dining establishment named Il Patrizio, would open at 206 East 63rd Street. This would be the eleventh partnership to take a risk at this address. This time, however, I was determined to stay away. What was the point of returning? What could I find there that I had not already found, and that my editor had not already told me he did not want me writing about? Still, I
had
to write something. I had signed a book contract in 1992, and now seven years had elapsed, and how could I justify this expenditure in time?
I spent the spring and early summer of 1999 going through my research files, rereading my notes, and rewriting some of the sections of various works that I had labored over but had never come close to finishing. There was the fifty-four-and-a-half-page section dealing with Frederick J. Schillinger and the origins of the “Willy Loman Building.” There was a forty-page introduction to my memoir, beginning with my arrival in 1949 at the University of Alabama. There were sixty pages of a travel book that described my first visit to Calabria in 1955. There was a book outline and ninety typed pages of notes concerning the financial struggles of the Chrysler automobile company, a subject that I had first pursued in 1982, conducting many interviews with Chrysler officials in Detroit and their Mitsubishi partners in Tokyo.
I had put aside this material in 1983, and had more or less forgotten about it while concentrating on the research and writing of
Unto the Sons
. Reviewing the Chrysler material now, in 1999, I considered the possibility of using some of it in an updated story about Chrysler's onetime leader, Lee Iacocca, an interesting man, whom I had remained in touch with since his retirement from the auto company and his relocation to Los Angeles, where he was now hoping to launch a company that manufactured electric bicycles. On reflection, however, I decided that an updated story about Iacocca probably belonged in a magazine, perhaps as a profile in
The New Yorker
.
There was also in my filing cabinet a few folders labeled “The Bobbittsâa work in progress (1993-1994).” I would have probably discarded this long before had it not been for the advice of
The New Yorker
's editor, Tina Brown, who suggested that it might someday be worthy of a short book. In the years since then, as tidbits of new information about the Bobbitt couple appeared occasionally in the press, I would collect it and insert it into my folders. There was a paragraph in 1995 announcing that the couple had finalized their divorce. It was also reported that Lorena Bobbitt, after having been forgiven by the jury for removing her husband's
penis, had resumed her career as a nail sculptress at a shopping mall in northern Virginia. There were many tabloid references to John Bobbitt at various times between 1995 and 1997 as he resided in Las Vegas and elsewhere in Nevada and also in Southern California, working sporadically as a tow-truck operator, a lumper, a bartender, a pizza deliverer, and a performer in pornographic films (although his penis was unable to achieve the full tumescence it had known prior to its last encounter with Lorena). In addition, John Bobbitt made a few nightclub appearances as a stand-up comic, and in one routine he made reference to his ex-wife: “The last thing I told her was that I wanted a separation, and she took it literally.”
Included in the Bobbitt folders were a few paragraphs that I myself had written:
While John Bobbitt received no credit from the nation's lexicographers, his mishap is singularly responsible for the P-word entering the English language as it is now commonly spoken by men and women in the everyday world and is being published unhesitatingly in the headlines of family newspapers. Had John Bobbitt received a penny every time “penis” had appeared in newsprint and been articulated on television and radio broadcasts since he unwittingly removed the fig leaf from the word, he would now be extremely rich. He did earn about $400,000 for his guest appearances as a curiosity on talk shows and for his half-erect debut as a porno stud, but most of this money was retained by his media adviser and his attorneys as compensation for his legal bills and other operating expenses during and after the trials.
The Hollywood agent for Lorena Bobbitt, Alan Hauge, has failed so far to sell her story to a movie studio but he said that he had earned her considerable sums of money from her appearances on foreign and domestic television shows and the interviews she gave to magazines overseas. These funds, Hauge said, enabled her to put a down payment on a new home in Virginia, and to arrange for her parents and her younger sister and brother in Venezuela to emigrate to the U.S.A. and stay with her.â¦
In early December 1997, after I had returned to New York from a sojourn in Alabamaâwhere I spent time with Selma's sixty-seven-year-old mayor Joseph T. Smitherman, who had served nine terms in office but would lose the next election to a youthful black candidate named James PerkinsâI was more than surprised to find on my answering machine a
message from Lorena Bobbitt. Her recorded voice was soft, timid, but urgent. “Please call me back as soon as you can,” she said; “I'm in trouble.” On the tape she explained that she had been arrested by the Virginia police in the aftermath of a noisy domestic dispute with her mother, and now Lorena had a favor to ask: Would I be willing to testify in her behalf as a “character witness”?
Absurd, ridiculous, laughable
âthese were the words that came to my mind as I replayed the tape. I was to be a character witness for a woman who, after cutting off her husband's penis, had been arrested following an altercation with her mother?
And
, I reminded myself, Lorena had been no help to me whatsoever when I had needed her during my assignment for
The New Yorker
. If I had then gotten Lorena's cooperation in the form of an interview, Tina Brown would have surely published my article, or so I preferred to believe. Why didn't Lorena rely upon the magazine writer from
Vanity Fair
and the correspondent from 20/20, both of whom she had favored with interviews, to be her character witnesses?
Still, I returned her call. And when she heard my voice, she began to cry. She pleaded with me to attend her trial. She was being charged with assault and battery. The case would be heard in early April 1998. It would take place in the same courthouse where, four years earlier, she had given her ingenue performance as the abused wife of John Bobbitt. I was actually too curious to miss her forthcoming appearance in court, and so on the phone I promised that I would be there. The occasion would also provide me with my first opportunity to see her mother as well as her father and her younger sister and brother, and this might help me to decide whether or not I wished to continue with my research on the Bobbitt saga as part of my vaguely defined book, which might be called
Down and Out in America
.