Crazy Salad (24 page)

“Jarvis of
Time
magazine,” said a voice behind him. He turned around. Jarvis of
Time
magazine was very pretty. She was also a media reporter.

“Porter of the
Tulark Morning Herald
,” Porter said. “I don’t know what I’m writing about. There’s no story. Because there’s no news story, there are no feature stories either.”

“What about the hookers?” said Jarvis.

“The hookers are taken,” said Porter.

“Oh, God,” said Jarvis. “I wonder if my writer knows that.”

“Your writer?” said Porter, but Jarvis had rushed out of the bar.

Monday night Porter got a floor pass and watched Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee being photographed. Then he joined a large crowd that was watching in disbelief as Evans and Novak had a conversation with each other. In the distance, Porter could hear Barbara Jordan speaking, but just barely. He wished he had stayed in his room and watched the convention on television. When the session ended, he bumped into Ken Franklin from
Newsday
.

“What are you writing about?” asked Franklin.

“I don’t know,” said Porter.

“Nobody’s saying that today,” said Franklin. “Today people have figured out what they’re doing.”

“Not me,” said Porter.

Franklin took Porter to the
Rolling Stone
party that night. When they arrived, several hundred people on the street were pushing up against the door to the party, and several dozen police were trying to hold them back.

“Who’s that with Seymour Hersh?” someone asked.

“Paul Newman,” someone answered.

Porter managed to push his way up to the front door, but it was locked. Every so often, a man would appear at the door and point out someone in the crowd and the police would scoop up the someone and get him through the door. Porter squeezed in with Walter Cronkite’s entourage, but once inside he found that the only topic of conversation was what was going on outside. A large group of
people upstairs were watching a television monitor showing pictures of the scene on the street, and another large group of people were watching themselves on a public-access television channel.

“Porter of the
Tulark Morning Herald
!” a voice shouted.

Porter looked around. It was Jarvis of
Time
magazine.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Leaving,” he said. “Do you want to come?”

“Yes,” said Jarvis.

Later, in Porter’s hotel room, Jarvis began to undress. “I hope this is off the record,” she said.

“Likewise,” said Porter.

At that moment, the phone rang.

“Porter of the
Tulark Morning Herald
,” said Porter.

“This is the New York City police,” said a man on the phone. “We picked up a naked man dancing on Thirty-sixth Street. He says he’s the mayor of Tulark, Idaho. Your name was in his pocket.”

“Is he with his secretary?” asked Porter.

“Yes,” said the policeman.

“Was she flown here on city money?” asked Porter.

“Yes,” said the policeman.

“Can she take shorthand?”

“No,” said the policeman.

“I’ll be right there,” said Porter. He put down the phone and started to dress. “I’m sorry, Jarvis,” he said. “I have to go out to become a media star.”

“That’s all right,” said Jarvis. “I can wait.”

October, 1976

I’m not sure you can make a generalization on this basis, which is the basis of twice, but here goes: whenever I get married, I start buying
Gourmet
magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride’s disease. The first time I started buying it was in 1967, when everyone my age in New York City spent hours talking about things like where to buy the best pistachio nuts. Someone recently told me that his marriage broke up during that period on account of veal Orloff, and I knew exactly what he meant. Hostesses were always making dinners that made you feel guilty, meals that took days to prepare and contained endless numbers of courses requiring endless numbers of plates resulting in an endless series of guests rising to help clear. Every time the conversation veered away from the food, the hostess looked hurt.

I got very involved in this stuff. Once I served a six-course Chinese dinner to twelve people, none of whom I still speak to, although not because of the dinner. I also specialized in little Greek appetizers that involved a great deal of playing with rice, and I once produced something known as the Brazilian national dish.
Then, one night at a dinner party, a man I know looked up from his chocolate mousse and said, “Is this Julia’s?” and I knew it was time to get off.

I can date that moment almost precisely—it was in December, 1972—because that’s when I stopped buying
Gourmet
magazine the first time around. And I can date that last
Gourmet
precisely because I have never thrown out a copy of the magazine. At the end of each month, I place it on the top of the kitchen bookshelf, and there it lies, undisturbed, forever. I have never once looked at a copy of
Gourmet
after its month was up. But I keep them because you never know when you might need to. One of the tricky things about the recipes in
Gourmet
is that they often refer back to recipes in previous copies of the magazine: for example, once a year, usually in January,
Gourmet
prints the recipe for pâte brisée, and if you throw out your January issue, you’re sunk for the year. All the tart recipes thereafter call for “one recipe pâte brisée (January, 1976)” and that’s that. The same thing holds for chicken stock. I realize that I have begun to sound as if I actually use the recipes in
Gourmet
, so I must stop here and correct that impression. I don’t. I also realize that I have begun to sound as if I actually read
Gourmet
, and I’d better correct that impression too. I don’t actually read it. I sort of look at it in a fairly ritualistic manner.

The first thing I turn to in
Gourmet
is the centerfold. The centerfold of the magazine contains the
Gourmet
menu of the month, followed by four color pages of pictures, followed by the recipes. In December the menu is usually for Christmas dinner, in November for Thanksgiving, in July for the Fourth, and in April—when I bought my first
Gourmet
in four years owing to my marriage that month to a man with a Cuisinart Food Processor—for Easter. The rest of the year there are fall luncheons and spring breakfasts, and so forth. But the point is not the menus but the pictures. The first
picture each month is of the table of the month, and it is laid with the china and crystal and silver of the month. That most of the manufacturers of this china and crystal and silver advertise in
Gourmet
should not concern us now; that comes later in the ritual. The table and all the things on it look remarkably similar every issue: very formal, slightly stuffy, and extremely elegant in a cut-glass, old-moneyed way. The three pages of pictures that follow are of the food, which looks just as stuffy and formal and elegant as the table itself. It would never occur to anyone at
Gourmet
to take the kind of sleek, witty food photographs I associate with the
Life
“Great Dinners” series, or the crammed, decadent pictures the women’s magazines specialize in.
Gourmet
gives you a full-page color picture of an incredibly serious rack of lamb persillé sitting on a somber Blue Canton platter by Mottahedeh Historic Charleston Reproductions sitting on a stiff eighteenth-century English mahogany table from Charles Deacon & Son—and it’s no wonder I never cook anything from this magazine: the pictures are so reverent I almost feel I ought to pray to them.

After the centerfold I always turn to a section called “Sugar and Spice.” This is the letters-to-the-editor department, and by all rights it should be called just plain “Sugar.” I have never seen a letter in
Gourmet
that was remotely spicy, much less moderately critical. “I have culled so many fine recipes from your magazine that I feel it’s time to do the sharing.…” “My husband and I have had many pleasant meals from recipes in
Gourmet
and we hope your readers will enjoy the following.…” Mrs. S. C. Rooney of Vancouver, B.C., writes to say that she and her husband leaf through
Gourmet
before every trip and would never have seen the Amalfi Drive but for the February, 1972, issue. “It is truly remarkable how you maintain such a high standard for every issue,” she says. Almost every letter then goes on to present the writer’s recipe—
brownies Weinstein, piquant mushrooms Potthoff, golden marinade Wyeth, Parmesan puff Jupenlaz. “Sirs,” writes Margy Newman of Beverly Hills, “recently I found myself with two ripe bananas, an upcoming weekend out of town, and an hour until dinnertime. With one eye on my food processor and the other on some prunes, I proceeded to invent Prune Banana Whip Newman.” The recipe for one prune banana whip Newman (April, 1976) followed.

“You Asked For It” comes next. This is the section where readers write in for recipes from restaurants they have frequented and
Gourmet
provides them. I look at this section for two reasons: first, on the chance that someone has written in for the recipe for the tart Tatin at Maxwell’s Plum in New York, which I would like to know how to make, and second, for the puns. “Here is the scoop du jour,” goes the introduction to peach ice cream Jordan Pond House. “We’d be berry happy,”
Gourmet
writes in the course of delivering a recipe for blueberry blintzes. “Rather than waffling about, here is a recipe for chocolate waffles.” “To satisfy your yen for tempura, here is Hibachi’s shrimp tempura.” I could go on, but I won’t; I do want to mention, though, that the person who writes these also seems to write the headlines on the “Sugar and Spice” column—at least I think I detect the same fine hand in such headlines as “Curry Favor,” “The Berry Best” and “Something Fishy.”

I skip the travel pieces, many of which are written by ladies with three names. “If Provence did not exist, the poets would be forced to invent it, for it is a lyrical landscape and to know it is to be its loving captive for life.” Like that. Then I skip the restaurant reviews.
Gourmet
never prints unfavorable restaurant reviews; in fact, one of its critics is so determined not to find fault anywhere that he recently blamed himself for a bad dish he was served at the Soho Charcuterie: “The potatoes that came with it (savoyarde?—
hard to tell) were disappointingly nondescript and cold, but I seemed to be having bad luck with potatoes
wherever
I went.” Then I skip the special features on eggplant and dill and the like, because I have to get on to the ads.

Gourmet
carries advertisements for a wide array of upper-class consumer goods (Rolls-Royce, De Beers diamonds, Galliano, etc.); the thing is to compare these ads to the editorial content of the magazine. I start by checking out the
Gourmet
holiday of the month—in May, 1976, for example, it was Helsinki—and then I count the number of ads in the magazine for things Finnish. Then I like to check the restaurants reviewed in the front against the restaurant ads in the back. Then, of course, I compare the china, silver and crystal in the menu of the month against the china, silver and crystal ads. All this is quite satisfying and turns out about the way you might suspect.

After that, I am pretty much through looking at
Gourmet
magazine. And where has it gotten me, you may ask. I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. Last April, when I began my second round, I think I expected that this time I would get around to cooking something from it. Then May passed and I failed to make the rhubarb tart pictured in the centerfold and I gave up in the recipe department. At that point, it occurred to me that perhaps I bought
Gourmet
because I figured it was the closest I would ever get to being a gentile. But that’s not it either. The real reason, I’m afraid, has simply to do with food and life, particularly married life. “Does everyone who gets married talk about furniture?” my friend Bud Trillin once asked. No. Only for a while. After that you talk about pistachio nuts.

December, 1976

Two years ago, my husband bought a cooperative in the Ontario Apartments in Washington, D.C. The Ontario is an old building as Washington apartment buildings go, turn of the century, to be imprecise, and it has high ceilings, considerable woodwork, occasional marble and views of various capital sights. It also has the
Ontario Bulletin
. The
Ontario Bulletin
is a mimeographed newsletter that arrives every month or so in the mailbox. It is supplemented by numerous urgent memos and elevator notices; many of these concern crime. The Ontario is located in what is charitably called a marginal neighborhood, and all of us who live there look for signs that it is on the verge of becoming less marginal. The fact that the local movie theater is switching from Spanish-language films to English-language films is considered a good sign. The current memo in the elevator is not: “During the past eight weeks,
FIVE ONTARIO WOMEN HAVE HAD THEIR PURSES SNATCHED
on the grounds or close by. Three of these events occurred this week.” This memo, written by Sue Lindgren, chairperson, Security Committee, goes on to state: “Fortunately, none of the victims was seriously
injured and no building keys were lost.” We were all relieved to read this, though I suspect that Christine Turpin was primarily relieved to read the part about the keys. Mrs. Turpin was president of the Ontario during the crime wave of May, 1976, when she wrote a particularly fine example of what I think of as the Turpin School of memo writing:

“There have been
three purse snatchings
at the Ontario’s front door in the last
two weeks
causing
lock changes twice
in the same period. All three incidents occurred in daylight hours; the three ‘victims’—all women—were returning from grocery stores on Columbia Road. Two of the three had ignored repeated and publicized advice:
DO NOT CARRY BUILDING KEYS IN YOUR POCKETBOOKS
. They also ignored other personal safety precautions. Much as we sympathize with them over their frightening experience and over the loss of their personal belongings, the fact remains that had these ‘victims’ heeded the warnings, everyone at the Ontario would have been spared the inconvenience of a second lock/key change in two weeks as well as the expenditure of $250 for replacements.”