Crazy Salad (22 page)

The next day, he called Bernstein and told him to come by his house immediately. Bernstein arrived within a few minutes, and the first thing Collin asked him to do was to sign a release absolving Collin of any responsibility for what he was about to say. Bernstein signed and Collin began talking. He told Bernstein to fix the spaghetti sauce, eliminate the crab claws from the menu, and do something about the chef, who, Collin said, was “a Massachusetts Greek who didn’t know from Turci’s.” If Bernstein failed to make improvements, Collin said he would be forced to give the restaurant a bad review—which he had in fact already written, and he read a few sample sentences from a piece of paper: “Frankly, we would all have been better off last year had the real Turci’s been allowed to die a natural though unwelcome death.… It seems to me that in the move uptown what the new Turci’s has proven is
that one can turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear. Requiescat.” Within a few days, the chef quit—Bernstein says it had nothing to do with Collin’s ultimatum—and Collin returned to the restaurant for a review. He gave the new Turci’s three stars. “Try finding the likes of Turci’s even in Italy,” he wrote. “The new Turci’s has the setting this marvelous restaurant has always deserved—a splendid place in which to serve its grand food.…”

At this point, we must pause to introduce a new character in this drama, a person Collin refers to as “my own favorite platonic dish.” Rima Drell Reck Collin is a professor of comparative literature at the University of New Orleans, an editor of
The Southern Review
, and, according to her husband, “the most creative and gifted cook in the world now.” She had just finished writing a New Orleans cookbook with her husband and was planning to open a food consulting firm in partnership with Warren Le Ruth of four-star, ten-platonic-dish fame. “The firm,” says Collin, “was an attempt to get her out from being Mrs. Underground Gourmet. She’s got enormous talent, but in this town she is still Mrs. Underground Gourmet.”

One day a few weeks after the good review appeared, Joe Bernstein visited Richard and Rima Collin to talk about the restaurant. He was still concerned about its inconsistency, particularly when it came to the spaghetti sauce. One thing led to another, and before the session was up, Bernstein had hired Mrs. Collin’s firm to fix the sauce. Bernstein paid her two thousand dollars for two months’ work—after which time she and Le Ruth, who had not been able to implement a new recipe, fought with each other and dissolved the partnership. The next month, Mrs. Collin sent Bernstein another bill, which Bernstein refused to pay. There was considerable shouting on Bernstein’s part and considerable crying on Mrs. Collin’s part. According to Bernstein, Mrs. Collin threatened his bookkeeper
and said that if he did not pay up, the restaurant would be hurt. Bernstein did not pay.

It was at this point, Richard Collin says, that he realized for the first time that he was in a spot. “I was in a very bad situation,” he said. “It was okay as far as helping the restaurant and shaking out the sauce—that struck me as a civic restoration—but once a falling-out occurred, I knew that anytime I changed the rating it would look suspect.” In January, 1975, just before the Super Bowl, Collin nonetheless printed a revised set of ratings for New Orleans restaurants. Turci’s was stripped down to an altogether new category—a star within parentheses, meaning “some good food but not a recommended restaurant.” What intrigued the owners of Turci’s about this new rating was that Collin had not eaten in Turci’s at any time since his original review had appeared.

A month later,
Figaro
, a small New Orleans weekly newspaper (in which, in keeping with the tenor of this saga, Joe Bernstein’s children own a minority interest), broke the story.
Figaro
’s editor, James Glassman, quoted Bernstein and Collin on the Turci’s episode, and also quoted Chris Ansel, the owner of Christian’s Restaurant, who said that Collin told him to fire his chef and cut down on the salt; when the chef failed to do so, Collin stripped Ansel of his stars and eleven platonic dishes. The
Figaro
article caused a sensation. The New Orleans Restaurant Association wrote the
States-Item
demanding that Collin be investigated. The Louisiana chefs association seconded the motion. A group of local restaurateurs tried to pressure the National Restaurant Association to drop Collin from a panel discussion at the association’s annual convention. There were television debates. There was an acrimonious press conference. Mrs. Galatoire of Galatoire’s accused Collin of not ordering a dish he subsequently reviewed. The
New Orleans Times-Picayune
—which has an active rivalry with the
States-Item
although both are owned by the Newhouse chain—unleashed its food writer to attack Collin.

Eventually, of course, the furor died down. The editor of the
States-Item
admitted that Collin had been “indiscreet” and that some of his behavior bordered on “a conflict of interest.” The
Times-Picayune
food writer announced that he would write a rival restaurant guide in which no restaurant would receive an unfavorable rating. Bernstein, not having managed to formulate the spaghetti sauce, moved on to specialize in canneloni. The people of New Orleans settled down to dinner. And Richard Collin learned a lesson. Not the exact lesson he might have—about the function of a critic, for example, or about the limits of critical involvement, or about the ethics of critical behavior—but he did learn something. “I learned,” he said, “that restaurants have a limited lifespan, and there’s no point in trying to save them.”

September, 1975

The other day, my sister Delia went up to the Bronx to buy a carpet from my cousin Arthur. I had last seen my cousin Arthur in 1963, when I went up to the Bronx to buy a carpet from my uncle Charlie, who is Cousin Arthur’s father. Uncle Charlie and Cousin Arthur used to be in the carpet business together, but Cousin Arthur left the family business some years ago to go off on his own, largely because he did not get along with Cousin Norman, who was also in the family business and whom no one in the family gets along with except for Uncle Charlie, who gets along with everyone. Anyway, when my sister Delia came back from the Bronx, having bought a very nice carpet at a very good price, she called up.

“Guess who Cousin Arthur is?” she said.

“I give up,” I said.

“Cousin Arthur is Uncle Art,” she said.

Actually, as I later found out, Cousin Arthur is Uncle Art only some of the time; the rest of the time a person named Jeremiah Morris is Uncle Art, and that is part of the problem. Still, Cousin
Arthur is Uncle Art more than Jeremiah Morris is Uncle Art, and if you don’t know who Uncle Art is, that’s either because you haven’t had to buy a discount carpet in New York lately, or because you’re not in the carpet business. Uncle Art is to the carpet business what Frank Perdue is to the chicken business: in short, he has his own commercial.

“My name is Art Ephron,” read the first of Cousin Arthur’s Uncle Art advertisements, which ran, along with a large picture of Cousin Arthur himself, in the New York
Daily News
in 1972, “and I’ve been in the carpet business for, oh, longer than I care to remember. And every few weeks it seemed one of my relatives would say, ‘Uncle Art, I was wondering, well, uh, maybe you could get us a break on some carpet. You know, something
nice
. Cheap.’ So, one night, I was thinking. If I could do this for my relatives, why not for everybody?” The ad went on at some length, spelling out the special things about Cousin Arthur’s Redi-Cut Carpets outlets (coffee, no pushy salesmen, a money-back guarantee, free rug cutting), and it ended with what has become the chain’s slogan: “It’s like having an uncle in the carpet business.”

I was so stunned to discover that one of those people you see pitching their products on late-night television was a relative of mine that I promptly went up to the Bronx to see Cousin Arthur for myself. I found him on Webster Avenue, at one of his stores, and he turned out to be an extremely affable man. He was also, incidentally, the largest Ephron I have ever met (he is six feet tall and weighs two hundred ten pounds) and the only member of the family I know of who has a beard (although I haven’t seen my cousin Erwin lately, and for all I know he may have one too). In any event, we went out to lunch and he told me about his advertising campaign.

“I started this company in 1971,” Cousin Arthur began. “I’d been living in Detroit, working in the carpet business, and I felt that carpet retailing was ripe for a plain, pipe-rack approach, sort of like Robert Hall. I’d had a run with regular carpet retailing. I’d worked for Korvettes.…”

“Is it true,” I asked, “that E. J. Korvettes stands for Eight Jewish Korean War Veterans?”

“It’s a base canard,” said Cousin Arthur. “The ‘E’ is for Eugene Ferkauf, the ‘J’ is for Joe Zwillenberg, and Korvette is the name of a subchaser in World War Two. To get back to what I was saying, I thought there was room for a no-frills approach to carpet retailing with remnants, so I called my friend Lenny, and he found a location in Mount Vernon, and we opened up. We hired a small ad agency in Scarsdale, and they came up with an ad that read: ‘Redi-Cut Carpets, a nice place to buy.’ We stayed with them for about a year. The business was growing, but we weren’t getting results from the ads. I’m a great advertising critic, but I can’t create an ad from scratch. So I called Cousin Mike and asked him what to do.” Cousin Michael Ephron is media director of Scali, McCabe, Sloves, the agency that created the Frank Perdue ad; he and Cousin Arthur had recently become friends on account of a carpet Michael needed for his den. “Michael didn’t want the account for his agency,” Arthur went on. “Big agencies hate handling retail ads. The detail work is incredible.” Michael suggested that Arthur and his partner Len Stanger go see a small creative agency called Kurtz & Symon. “They made a presentation,” said Arthur, “and we got married.”

Kurtz & Symon went to work and came up with the Uncle Art ads; in addition, the agency had Uncle buttons printed for all the salesmen at Redi-Cut. Even Cousin Arthur’s wife, Hazel, got a button
that said Uncle Hazel. The ads worked. Pictures of Cousin Arthur as Uncle Art filled New York and Westchester County papers. Business got better. More branches were opened. And Kurtz & Symon began to press Cousin Arthur to take his advertising campaign to television. At the time, a man named Jerry Rosenberg, proprietor of J.G.E. Enterprises, a discount appliance store in Queens, had become a household word in New York because of his commercial, delivered in an unrelenting Brooklyn accent, that began: “So what’s the story, Jerry?” It was logical for Cousin Arthur to go on television too. But it didn’t work out that way.

“I got scared,” said Cousin Arthur. “I’m no actor. I’m impatient. I’d gotten really annoyed with the amount of time it took just to do the print ads. They were doing these photo sessions of me where they roped off half the Mount Vernon store for two and a half hours just to take a picture. I was losing business. I was going crazy. And I didn’t think I’d be any good on television. Lenny could have done it. Lenny’s a real ham. Maybe the campaign should have been Uncle Len. But I didn’t think I could do it. Suppose I blew it? So I said, Let’s get a professional guy. They got an actor named Jeremiah Morris. Jerry’s about five inches shorter than me, ten years older, he’s bald and has no beard. Outside of that, he looks exactly like me.”

Kurtz & Symon brought Morris and a toupee and a false beard up to the store to shoot the commercials. “I’m Uncle Art from Redi-Cut Carpets,” Morris began, and Cousin Arthur became upset. He began to complain to both Don Kurtz and Jim Symon. “He kept trying to change the actor’s performance,” said Jim Symon, who I spoke to about all this. “Most of his complaints had to do with the fact that he, Arthur, was more handsome than the actor, and that he, Arthur, was taller. Then we showed him the ad
when it was done and he complained some more. He said the actor was playing it too much like Jerry of J.G.E. By that time there was so much money committed to the ad it had to be run. It was an academic discussion.”

A few weeks later, in the fall of 1973, the commercials went on the air. Cousin Arthur would sit in front of his television set, switching from one non-network channel to the next, watching Jeremiah Morris come on as Uncle Art six times a night. “I would look and listen and I would sort of resent the fact that he really didn’t look or sound like me. It really began to bother me.” Every so often, he would make his wife, Uncle Hazel, sit through yet another viewing of the commercial. “After it was over, I’d ask her, ‘Do I really sound like that? Do I really look like that?’ She’d say no. But everyone else thought I did. I began getting calls from people I’d known for years. ‘I saw you on TV last night,’ they’d say. No one ever said to me, ‘Hey, that wasn’t you.’ Tell me. You’ve seen the commercial. Does that look like me? Does that sound like me?”

In fact, it doesn’t. But in any case, the commercials worked. Soon there were four of them on television, and soon Cousin Arthur and his partner Lenny owned eight carpet outlets. Cousin Arthur could hardly complain. Or could he?

“There’s something I think I should tell you,” he said, lowering his voice so that no one in the Red Coach Grill at the Cross County Shopping Center could hear. “I think I’m getting a divorce from Kurtz and Symon.”

“What?” I said.

“I’m thinking of dropping them and going absolutely gigantically big into radio.”

“Why?”

“I spend thirty percent of my budget on agency fees,” said
Cousin Arthur. “On radio you spend nothing. The radio station writes the ad for you. And my selling will be done by disk jockeys like Bob Grant, William B. Williams and Julius LaRosa.”

“But what will happen to Uncle Art?” I asked.

“That’s a problem,” said Cousin Arthur. “We may be at the crossroads for Uncle Art.”

“Have you talked to Cousin Michael about all of this?” I asked.