CHAPTER 12
WOO HIM WITH CALF’S HEAD
1954–1956
THE OUTDOOR BOOK with Helen seemed cursed. In January 1954, Clara Claasen told James and Helen she wanted the manuscript by the end of February, so Doubleday could publish it in time for the summer grilling season—she’d heard that Scribner’s was planning to release a competing book in late spring.
But Doubleday hadn’t even given them a contract. Before she could draft one and release the advance money, she’d need an outline.
Helen had never written a formal book outline, plus her mysterious ailments had flared up again: canker sores, gut pains, dizziness. By order of her doctor, she was taking phenobarbital, and as a result was finding it hard to focus. Instead, she made a rough list of things she thought they should cover and sent it to James.
By the end of January 1954, James had an outline. The title alone indicated his sprawling vision:
THE HELEN EVANS BROWN–JAMES A. BEARD GUIDE TO COOKING AND EATING OUT OF DOORS
The Complete Coverage of Picnics, Galley Cooking, The Manly Art of Barbecuing & The More Refined Art of Terrace and Patio Cookery.
James envisioned a book as big and comprehensive as Fireside, one that ranged from outdoor grill to indoor kitchen, from campfire skillet to garden-party chafing dish. It covered almost everything one could ever imagine eating outdoors: al fresco cocktail parties, “big garden crushes,” he wrote, “with caterers and all the rest of the rented paraphernalia.” He included travel cookery: snacks to pack for flights and car trips, “how to make a transcontinental trip a gourmetic experience instead of a series of diners and dirty spoons.” He wanted a chapter with tips “to really romanticize eating in the wilds.” There was a chapter on what he called Oriental cookery: “How to use the hibachi, make sukiyaki, teriyaki, satés, etc.” He proposed a chapter on wine and drinks. And he hadn’t given up on the idea of a cooks’ controversy with Helen—discussions on the best ways to cook things, with digressions and lively disagreements, a back-and-forth that would show off their distinct personalities.
And despite the rigorous gender rules of the time, James’s outline blurred the gender roles. His proposal for the chapter on “garden, terrace and patio cookery” didn’t specify the cook’s sex. “This is for the person who enjoys grilling in the out-of-doors,” he wrote, “and who works in conjunction with the house.” Elsewhere he sounded more circumspect, referencing “the man who wishes to show his prowess at the grill and range” and “the woman who likes to complement her husband’s starring role.” He raised a third possibility, too: “the man who likes to do everything.” He neglected only the woman who’d also prefer to do everything, grilling the steaks and making the succotash to go with it.
He sent the outline to Helen. She vented her rage privately to Schaffner.
First, the book James proposed was too long. “Complete, yes,” she wrote to her agent, “but not a [book that will take up a] blooming fifty foot shelf! . . . Why bring in the things that are cooked in the kitchen and just EATEN outdoors.”
Second: “As for the managing [of] caterers,” Helen wrote, “isn’t that a bit. . . . . . ?” It was. Also the parts about romantic travel cooking and avoiding greasy spoons. James’s ideas were precious.
Schooled in magazine food writing, Helen believed in a clear division of the sexes. She expected a firewall between men’s cooking outdoors—building a backyard barbecue; manning the grill and rotisserie—and women’s—planning the menu, making marinades and sauces, and preparing hors d’oeuvres and side dishes. James’s outline was too big, too digressive, and too confusing about who should cook what.
“I don’t get it,” she told Schaffner.
James was merely warming up. “I think I have become pregnant with ideas suddenly,” he told her. He proposed a campy new name in his next letter: Balls, Picnics and Other Outdoor Pursuits. “We can afford to be a little chichi in this book and to give them something new,” James told Helen. “And shouldn’t we call it At Home Off the Range just to be cute?—or would you prefer doing it outdoors in small letters as if it were by e. e. cummings; or would you like Helen Evans Brown and James A. Beard [C]ook al [F]resco? Sprinkle these with salt and pepper and add a little tarragon and then off to the races.”
He wanted it to be carefree. Meanwhile, Helen just wanted to write a short, solidly useful book about grilling, to get it over with and move on.
Clara Claasen agreed that the book’s focus should be limited: grilling and rotisserie cooking only, no chafing dishes or caterers, no airline snacks or romance of eating in the wilds, and no cooks’ controversy. Claasen sought to keep the page count and production costs low. Instead of trying to rush it onto the market in mere months, Doubleday decided to publish in spring 1955. The manuscript was due in September 1954.
Buried in James and Helen’s contract was a lousy advance, a miserable thousand dollars (just over nine thousand in 2019 dollars), split between them: half on signing, half when Doubleday accepted the finished manuscript. They’d get royalties on ten percent of sales. After Schaffner’s commission, Helen and James each got $225 up front. James knew the Browns were hard up for cash; he offered to take $200 for the first payout and let Helen have $250. She could make it up to him on the second.
Collaborating on a manuscript was maddening.
In early May 1954, after his road trip with the Browns, James began a two-month stay in their rough attic guest room on Armada Drive. He’d hoped he and Helen could hammer the outdoor book into reasonable shape in three weeks, but so much else intervened. First they organized a sprawling Skotch Grill party for food media on the Browns’ patio: a huge marble table with three of the red-plaid bucket grills for cooking shrimp and rumaki (chicken livers and water chestnuts wrapped with bacon), and for heating up morsels of carnitas, all on skewers. There was a punch bowl filled with martinis, and two Bartron Grills spit-roasting beef for sandwiches. General Bartron himself even showed up, toting a third grill.
Then James had to fly to Chicago for a lucrative one-day appearance representing Cognac. There were dinner parties: one at Eleanor Peters’s house, another at the home of Judith Anderson, the lesbian character actor famous for playing Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. She served rumaki—the trendiest hors d’oeuvre of 1954—and coq au vin.
James and Helen went on Mike Roy’s Cooking Thing, a CBS radio show broadcast to the nation from LA. They made several visits to Helen’s favorite shop in Little Tokyo. James bought silk bow ties and a Japanese kimono-style short robe he wore on the sunken patio every morning, sipping jasmine tea and listening to the birds. Progress on the book was slow.
The way they worked couldn’t have been less compatible. They tried testing recipes together, a grinding process. They tried writing by consensus, one of them at the typewriter while the other suggested sentences. When that didn’t work, Helen proposed that James write first drafts; later she’d revise them and add her own thoughts. That proved just as difficult.
Schaffner received separate reports from both. Each complained privately about the other.
“Jim and I work very differently,” Helen told Schaffner. “He bangs stuff out on the typewriter and never looks at it again so I am doing more condensing and rewriting than anything else. I am a polisher, which he doesn’t believe in.”
“The book is going slowly,” James told Schaffner. “Confidentially, my dear John, Helen is quite upset—I think due to a physical condition and it is sometimes hard to get things accomplished. I have lost time. . . . Wish us well.”
At the end of June 1954, eight weeks after they started work on the book, James prepared to return east. He rushed to finish up the last recipes. Friction had begun to grind away at his friendship with Helen, who seemed increasingly brittle. Meanwhile, James’s lack of skill as a writer shocked Helen—she hadn’t realized the extent to which Isabel rewrote his copy. And despite his having authored Cook It Outdoors, she was surprised by his lack of knowledge about grilling.
“Actually Philip knows much more about cooking over charcoal than does Jim,” Helen told Schaffner. “But J is learning. J is doing most of the writing and frankly I think overdoing it. It’s much too wordy and my job will be to rewrite it after he leaves. . . . That will be worse than doing the whole thing from scratch but it seems to be the best solution. Oh lord,” she groaned, “why do I ever write another book?”
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JAMES WAS SAYING YES to too many projects. In February 1954, he was finishing a small book for Jerry Mason, his old editor at Argosy. Mason had launched his own publishing company with Fred R. Sammis, Maco Magazine Corporation. The plan was to churn out cheap popular paperbacks with a retail price of seventy-five cents to sell in drugstores and supermarkets and on newsstands. (At the same time, a typical hardcover cookbook with good production values cost $3.95.) Mason also made a deal with Indianapolis-based publishing house Bobbs Merrill to produce hardback editions of all Maco soft covers.
Mason had enlisted James to write Maco’s first title, a book on outdoor cookery. Jim Beard’s Complete Book of Barbecue & Rotisserie Cooking appeared in May 1954: more than two hundred recipes on exactly the same subject as his planned Doubleday collaboration with Helen. James received a flat fee of $2,000 up front, with no royalties on future sales.
And though Schaffner raised this potential conflict of interest with Claasen, she didn’t seem to mind. But then, Claasen was a strange and difficult editor. For weeks in her conversations with Schaffner, she seemed to think Helen’s last name was “West,” apparently having misread the title of Helen Brown’s West Coast Cook Book. “You know,” Schaffner noted with sarcasm in a letter to Helen, “Mrs. West, the author of the Coast Cook Book!”
It soon became obvious that Claasen had never edited a cookbook and knew little about food. Schaffner alternated between feeling sorry for her and thinking she was out of her mind.
“I won’t go into any more details about what I have gone through with her lately or what she said to Jim,” Schaffner told Helen, “but she certainly seems to be a mentally sick person.” He found her emotionally exhausting.
Once back in New York, James worked to deliver the recipes he’d promised, but his passion for the outdoor book sputtered after Helen and Claasen bled the life out of most of his ideas.
He’d wanted to write an outdoor entertaining book that combined his panache, oversize personality, and adaptations of classic French recipes with Helen’s contemporary tastes, her relaxed California style, and her wit. He’d envisioned a book with the high–low mix of foods he had unleashed at Lucky Pierre. Helen and Claasen, however, wanted a lean manual of helpful tips and technical information on cooking over charcoal. In essence, they were working on two different books. Instead of the marquee name that gave the collaboration credibility, James was starting to look like a liability.
“It is [Claasen’s] idea that it was Jim’s influence which led the book project astray in the beginning,” Schaffner told Helen. “This seems a rather odd charge to level against the author of a column for Argosy magazine on cooking outdoors by men. But I must say for Clara that the evidence seems to be in her favor. Certainly, the material which has come in from Jim has been all for sauces and so on.”
It was true. Helen nixed James’s recipes for béchamel and mignonette sauces. She added back the béchamel after James complained; the mignonette stayed dead. James wanted to add desserts other than grilled fruit—the délice au chocolat he perfected at Lucky Pierre, for example. Helen and Claasen vetoed the idea.
Helen was frustrated—the job of finishing the manuscript was hers alone. Philip stepped in to test the recipe stragglers; he spit-roasted a whole albacore tuna and retested the rotisserie recipes to double-check timing and temperature. He edited Helen’s copy, rewriting it where necessary, and typed the final manuscript.
James and Helen were contractually obligated to offer Doubleday their next books, whether solo or a second collaboration. James had soured on both possibilities. “What Doubleday—or rather Miss Claasen[—]gets out of me next,” he told Helen, “is a book on how to sort garbage and use it for leftovers.”
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IN AUGUST 1954, a month before Claasen would receive the finished manuscript for the outdoor collaboration, James’s second title for Maco appeared. Jim Beard’s Complete Cookbook for Entertaining contained nearly five hundred recipes. The cover showed a cartoony George Peter still-life in pink and pineapple yellow; the back had a photo of James shot by Josephine von Miklos, who caught him in a wicked laugh. The Entertaining book captured James’s essence—authoritative yet alive to pleasure—with all the color and personality that were lacking from his labored collaboration with Helen.
James kept the book a secret from her.
In January 1955, Helen happened on a hardcover copy of the Entertaining book. As she flipped through its pages, she became furious. James had used some of the recipes that would appear in their collaboration—now titled The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery—later that spring. He had plagiarized the manuscript they had just finished, essentially stealing recipes from the book for which they were developed.
The recipe in Entertaining for Bacon and Egg Salad was identical to the one in their yet-to-appear Doubleday book. Shrimps Beard were word-for-word Shrimps Pierre (named for Lucky Pierre) in the Outdoor book. What’s more, he lifted Escabêche de Pescado from Helen Brown’s West Coast Cook Book without attribution. He gave a nod to Elena Zelayeta for some—though not all—of the recipes he borrowed from her. The closer Helen looked, the angrier and more appalled she became.
She wrote James a letter that hid her true fury. He was, after all, one of the most powerful people in food. And though they were friends, in 1955 it seemed unacceptable for a woman, especially an angry one, to challenge a man.
“To be perfectly honest I am a bit cross with you,” she told James. “You have included stuff that is in our book and that I have been studiously avoiding using until it was published.” She knew only too well his habit of plagiarizing himself and others. “I know that you won’t resent it when I tell you, dear, that I really think you have repeated yourself too much in your last few books,” she said. “That is why I think you ought to rest on your laurels for a while.”
She unloaded her real outrage in a letter to Schaffner:
He not only used innumerable of my best ideas without credit, he used some that I have NOT used anywhere because I wanted them fresh for the Doubleday book. He quotes from Elena, also without credit. (He apparently thinks that if he gives credit once that that is enough. It isn’t.) He also repeats himself entirely too much. His last 3 or 4 books have many of the same recipes. People are going to say “the same old Beard stuff?” Truly I am worried . . . for him[,] and put out for others.
James apologized. He told her the Doubleday recipes found their way into the Maco book by accident. “When the mss was typed,” he explained, “there were other sheets that got mixed up and around that weren’t supposed to be in it.” It was an obvious lie.
“Jim dear,” she wrote back. “Your [sic] a sweet lamb not to be mad at me for balling you out. I did it only because I love you so much I didn’t want you to make an awful mistake. Also maybe because I was a little jealous at your being smart enough to make so much money.”
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DOUBLEDAY PUBLISHED The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery on April 21, 1955, timed for the start of grilling season. It’s a thin book, just under 250 pages, with no illustrations save some barbecue construction diagrams borrowed from Argosy and Virginia Plummer’s stylish endpapers.
The book’s central lesson was that meats cook best over charcoal kept low and steady. References to James and Helen’s experiences are scarce. Instead, the book elevates outside experts: General Bartron; Jorge Ramirez, proprietor of the Acme Barbecue College in Alhambra, California; and Eagle Scout leader and camping expert Hugo Hammer. There’s a dull, servicey, how-to quality to the writing. The style and tone echo Helen’s magazine work, only without the usual brightness and clever turns of phrase. James’s voice is silent, his typical opinions and anecdotes absent, and his manifest love for eating and pleasure nowhere to be found.
The collaboration both had pushed for yielded a dry book neither of them liked, a squandering of their personalities. Helen blamed Claasen. James and Helen would never collaborate on another book.
“You and I have never done one that is so dull to read,” Helen told James a few months before publication day. “I am reading Alice B. Toklas which points out, more than ever, the lack of chit chat [sic] in ours.” But chitchat was what James had wanted for the book from the start: Helen had said no as forcefully as Claasen did. Though James and Helen were still friends—still believed themselves allies against a food establishment deaf to original voices—the experience had drained the joy from their alliance.
The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery was a commercial flop. The numbers for 1955 were bad; the ones in the first half of 1956 were worse. In August 1956, James opened his Doubleday royalty statement and was stunned. Nationally, only 292 copies had sold in the previous quarter. Doubleday didn’t seem interested in trying to sell it.
“They didn’t do a fucking thing about the book this year,” he wrote to Helen. “I think it would be better to start a hamburger stand and make twenty thousand a year with it. It’s murder!! That’s what it surely is!!!!!!!!!!”
The truth is they’d produced a book so bland that nobody but serious outdoor-cooking hobbyists had a reason to pick it up.
Not since Hors D’Oeuvre and Canapés, his first, had James done a book in which he wasn’t present. Of course, Doubleday and Claasen would show a lack of imagination, a narrow desire to cash in on the outdoor cooking frenzy while spending as little as possible on production. But Helen, he felt, had betrayed him. Despite his and Helen’s shared disdain for home economists in cookbooks and magazine food, Helen had resisted all of James’s attempts to write a book that put their personalities on display. Despite her original ideas, she still represented the dominant strain in American life, the suburban cook whose husband would man the coals while she assembled the rumaki and tossed the salad in the kitchen.
In August 1954, three weeks before their manuscript was due, James had urged Helen to scrap it. He wanted them to send the advance—such as it was—back to Doubleday and write the book they wanted to do. They’d find another publisher. Helen resisted.
Though James was one of the most famous food authorities in America, he knew he was above all a personality. And while there were many things about his life James couldn’t let the public—and even some of his friends—see, he embodied a gourmet lifestyle that seemed new and thrilling in America. James was an American epicure devoted to pleasure at the table as an essential part of the good life. If he wanted to wheel out an exuberant homemade délice au chocolat as the perfectly wicked finish to a porterhouse broiled on a bed of molten blue cheese, well—it was an essential part of what made James fascinating. Who cared if he didn’t get the timing on rotisserie chickens exactly right? Even if Helen didn’t, Jerry Mason at Maco surely saw what made James unforgettable.
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“SATURDAY I AM HAVING Ken Zwerlein [sic] from San Francisco,” James wrote to Helen in 1954, months before their road trip. “[He] is one of the very chi-chi California bunch who will have only the greatest of everything.”
James had got the name wrong. Ken Zwerin was a lawyer, a sort of satellite member of the San Francisco branch of the Wine and Food Society traveling to New York on business. He wrote to James, asking whether they could meet. An amateur gourmet, he cooked from Fireside and Paris Cuisine. He’d heard much about James.
Zwerin was born in San Francisco in 1911. As a youth, he studied to become a rabbi. In college, he switched to law and eventually became an attorney, though he delivered guest sermons at Reform congregations in San Francisco and elsewhere. In 1935, Zwerin took over his father’s law practice, writing occasional essays on the subject of ethics in Reform Judaism. He had the blessings of success and a taste for luxury: an office downtown near the Palace Hotel, and an apartment in plush Pacific Heights, in a palazzo-style highrise building with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The only wrinkle: Zwerin was queer.
Living openly would have cost him his law practice and standing in his congregation, so he kept his identity hidden. Behind the scenes, he joined one of the earliest gay rights groups in America, the Mattachine Society.
Mattachine formed in Los Angeles in 1950, when eight men, including Harry Hay, a Communist labor organizer and sometime actor, drafted a gay rights manifesto. It called for seizing equality through direct political action. Except in the spring of 1953, at Mattachine’s first national convention in LA, members voted to adopt a new, softer agenda. It called for an end to radical action in favor of a gradual move into the mainstream of society, an assimilationist strategy for achieving gay civil rights. It relied in part on the activism of influential homophiles—upstanding members of society (not gay themselves, presumably) who took an enlightened, tolerant view toward homosexuals.
Publicly, this was Zwerin’s persona: a straight homophile lawyer who defended suspected homosexuals swept up in vice-squad raids and charged with vagrancy, a life-shattering conviction. Zwerin may have been motivated by conscience and conviction, but he wasn’t purely altruistic. Few lawyers in the 1950s were interested in defending homosexuals. Accused men were desperate, willing to pay almost any fee a good lawyer demanded, especially one referred by Mattachine, as Zwerin was.
As a Jew, Zwerin was denied formal entry to the Wine and Food Society (“the holy of holies,” James called it), though he did attend events as a guest and threw parties for members, no doubt hoping they’d drop their (unofficial) anti-Semitic covenant, at least in his case.
And so, James invited the visiting lawyer to dinner at his apartment, for a menu Zwerin requested, remarkably porky even for a Reform almost-rabbi: a Swiss onion tart with bacon, and choucroute garnie, the Brasserie Lipp recipe from Paris Cuisine (coincidentally, James’s seduction dish). James invited “the boys”: Alvin and Peter, Paul Bernard, Freddie Shrallow. The choucroute was superb; the Alsatian Riesling they drank with it was cool, liquefied gold.
While Zwerin may have been wooing James that night as a member of the Wine and Food Society, he was also courting him to become a supporter of Mattachine: a high-profile professional (closeted, as he was) to come out publicly as a homophile and endorse homosexual rights, as any dispassionate American of conscience would.
Six weeks later, in April 1954, Zwerin tried again. It was when James was in San Francisco, alone for a few days, waiting for the Browns to arrive in the Coronet for their infamous road trip. James and Zwerin met for dinner at Vince’s Garden Restaurant in North Beach. A third man joined them.
Considering Zwerin’s reputation as a gourmet, Vince’s was a surprising choice. It was a so-so Italian joint, where a broiled steak came with an antipasto of salami and olives and a bowl of minestrone, and where the best bottle on the list was Beringer Burgundy. For privacy, however, it was perfect: deep, narrow, dark, and out of the way.
The third at the table that night was Elver Barker, a sweet, socially awkward young man with a long face and a high crown of blond hair. Barker was an ardent member of the editorial board of the San Francisco Mattachine Society. He had joined a year earlier, after being tossed from his job as an Oakland social worker when his supervisor deduced he was gay. Over calamari and zabaglione, the men talked.
Whatever Zwerin and Barker said to James about endorsing Mattachine and the homophile movement, it wasn’t persuasive enough for him to become a public supporter and maybe, under a pen name, write something for the Mattachine Review. For the Dean of American Cookery, the risk at the other end of the calculation was too great.
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PRACTICALLY EVERYONE IN James’s intimate circle—the people he trusted, relaxed with, and thought of as family—was lesbian or gay.
There were Cheryl Crawford and Ruth Norman; also Ann Seranne and John Schaffner. Alvin Kerr and Peter Carhartt had been together since college, when both were aspiring playwrights and actors. Peter—heir to the Carhartt work-wear company—had a small part in a Broadway show once; later, he and Alvin wrote for The Kate Smith Hour on radio and did scripts for army training films during the war. Alvin worked with James at the Sherry wine store, and James and the boys were Greenwich Village neighbors. Likewise Freddie Shrallow, an interior decorator who lived in a large studio apartment in a townhouse on West Twelfth almost directly opposite James’s.
Aleks Bird was a dancer in the ballet chorus for the 1944 revival of The Merry Widow at City Center, and he was in Mexican Hayride, a show with Cole Porter songs at the Winter Garden. He’d hung up his tights to write (try, anyway) about food and wine. Paul Bernard, married in all details but law to the artist Harry Marinsky, was James’s regular theater companion for shows, including opera and ballet. Bernard worked in publicity. He stayed in the city during the week and on weekends joined Marinsky at their cottage in Connecticut, where Marinsky kept his studio. In 1957, James became good friends with Mateo Lettunich. He’d worked for the State Department in Berlin after the war as cultural affairs adviser, helping to rebuild the city’s shattered theaters and concert halls. In New York, Lettunich wrote plays for NBC television.
And James’s dearest friends who weren’t queer—Sam and Florence Aaron, Cecily Brownstone, Helen McCully, and of course the Browns—were ones he could trust to know his heart, and a few of his secrets.
In 1954, someone new joined James’s core of gay friends. At thirty-three, John Ferrone had a face reminiscent of busts of the young Augustus: large, soft eyes and a resolute expression, boyish yet fierce. He was from a small town in New Jersey, the fifth child of Italian immigrants. His father never learned much English, and Ferrone wasn’t fluent in Italian, so his mother would translate: Ferrone grew up never having a direct conversation with his father. At nineteen, he left home to serve in World War II and had a brief stint on Guam. He went to college after the war, eventually landing at Stanford, studying creative writing with Wallace Stegner. In 1953, Ferrone moved to New York and met James’s close friend Paul Bernard. Ferrone lived in a tiny third-floor walk-up on West Twelfth, doors from James’s place. Bernard introduced them as neighbors.
Ferrone was working as a reader for Dell Books, a publisher of mass-market paperbacks, not respected among prestigious New York houses. He became an editor. Dell published inexpensive reprints of classic works; Ferrone’s first assignment was persuading Noel Coward, who’d staged a recent comeback in Las Vegas, to let Dell publish a collection of his works: short plays, stories, lyrics. There was one song—“Mad About the Boy,” from Coward’s Words and Music—for which Ferrone couldn’t find definitive lyrics, so he looked up Coward at his apartment in New York. He lay on his stomach on the carpet, scribbling in a notebook as the great man recited. The young editor had proved his meticulousness and gumption as well as his interest in older gay heroes.
Ferrone would go on to Harcourt, Brace and World, where he’d edit Eudora Welty, Anaïs Nin, and Alice Walker for its Harvest paperback imprint. He would also edit James, for Dell and other publishers, though they had become friends before that. Soon after Paul Bernard introduced them, Ferrone started dropping by James’s for dinner, usually for dishes James was testing for his regular House & Garden features, the Doubleday outdoor book, or the one on entertaining for Maco. Eventually they cooked together, as often as three times a week when James was in town.
Like James, Ferrone was discreetly gay in his private life, closeted in his professional one. James trusted his closest friends not to violate the central rule of being queer in the brutal era after the war: that you never, ever publicly acknowledged being queer, or even hinted at it. No matter how flagrant the signs were, in any sphere but the private you didn’t let on that you could interpret them. Caricatures of queens and fairies popped up in plays and movies, but you didn’t as much as roll your eyes to a queer friend in public for fear of outing yourself—or them. For that you needed to be in a safe zone: a friend’s apartment, or perhaps one of the few drinking establishments in the Village where, if you couldn’t let your hair all the way down, you could tease out a few strands.
In 1958, James received a gift from his old friend Ken Zwerin: a year’s subscription to the gay-rights magazine ONE. It was the monthly publication of the civil rights organization One Inc., based in Los Angeles. ONE launched its first issue in 1953, but the Post Office Department quickly deemed it obscene and refused to deliver it. In 1958, the US Supreme Court denied the Post Office its refusal. James’s subscription started with the July issue, with a cover story on gay beaches. It wasn’t the kind of thing one could leave lying around—ever. Even certain letters were risky.
James and his closest circle of friends had an unspoken agreement to protect the reputations of the others. It was, after all, how one survived.
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THE TRUTH IS THAT James had arrived in Mexico in July 1955 as a gigolo, a rich man’s accessory. It gave James a laugh. Fate had destined Elizabeth Beard’s boy—all three hundred pounds of him, currently sweating into his best tan summer suit and feeling a second trickle of perspiration sluice down the back of his neck—to be a gigolo of the table. After all, it was nice to be wanted for something.
He had been flown down from New York, with a layover in New Orleans due to heavy rain. He was now in the back of a limousine in Ciudad de México belonging to Mr. Francis George Guth of New York—also of Andover, Massachusetts, and Spain, where he owned a castle.
Mexico City was a place too hot for anyone with sense to visit in July, except as the guest of a millionaire. James was grateful to be away from New York and his telephone and Helen’s tortuously restrained letters of rage and recrimination. He’d been here before, not long ago in May, again as a guest of Guth and his wife, Barbara. James was here for only a week before he flew home and made a lunch of cold, crusty spit-roasted baby lamb and Basque piperade for Marilyn Monroe at Cheryl and Ruth’s place in New Canaan. (She was so quiet and unassuming, really: just a terribly shy and thoughtful person.)
Guth was a little over thirty, born in Vienna. His parents had owned an enormous linoleum factory and left him a fortune. For being such a young man, Guth was well jowled. He had a small mouth that looked cruel, usually, though occasionally it struck James as passionate, attuned to pleasure, even sexy. His forehead was high and broad, under dark, rigorously barbered hair with a meticulous part. His jaguar eyes, which sometimes looked as though they were fixed on something in the distance, something he desired, were hard to look away from, and certainly to say no to.
Guth arrived in the US in 1940 to go to a rich boys’ prep school and get out of Hitler’s way. He settled in Andover and became a dedicated amateur gourmet. He gave tons of money to the New York Wine and Food Society, so of course Madame Owen and that crowd were all over him. And he was an investor, along with David Rockefeller, in Château Lascombes, Alexis Lichine’s wine estate in Bordeaux (where James had visited in 1953). He traveled with the sole aim of tasting dishes he’d heard of and wanted to sample, and not just in Europe (though he always cited steak au poivre at Paul et Virginie in Paris as one of his personally defining dishes). Guth had sought out rock lobsters flamed with rum in Haiti and land crab asopao in Puerto Rico. He was fond of recalling a lunch in Havana of sautéed moro (stone) crabs finished with vintage Bacardi, which he enjoyed with beer.
Guth owned a regal old hacienda here in colonia San Ángel (not far from the studio of that artist who looked like a bulldog, Diego Rivera), with lawns and ancient trees and peacocks strutting behind a high wall. He’d brought James here to get his opinion, and to use him as a prop.
Guth also had opened a restaurant in Mexico City, a Continental steakhouse named Passy. It was at Amberes 10, a block from the deluxe Hotel El Presidente. James had seen it in May, just before the public unveiling. It had a patio and an open charcoal grill topped with sizzling T-bones and New York strips, the finest raised in the country. (One of Guth’s hobbies was to prove that, contrary to the American prejudice, Mexican beef could be sensational.) “I’ve always wanted to have a place,” Guth told local gossip columnist Pepe Romero, “where I could get what I wanted to eat at the time when I wanted to eat it.”
Of course, Guth had servants to cook for him anytime, but he yearned to dine in a vanity restaurant to which he could invite businessmen, politicians, starlets . . . AND the most famous gourmet in America, now pulling up in Guth’s limousine on a sweltering afternoon when even the peacocks squatting under the trees seemed stunned.
: : :
NEXT MORNING, Guth took James to the markets: Mercado Coyoacan and La Merced. That night, James was guest of honor at a dinner for thirty at the Passy restaurant, where the centerpiece was a grand baron of Sonoran beef, spit-roasted slowly on the patio. Waiters bearing bowls of colonial silver ladled béarnaise onto guests’ plates. James did what he was brought here to do: He declared it marvelous, cooked to perfection, tricky for such a lean animal as this clearly was. Why, if he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn he was eating beef from one of the fine French cattle of the Camargue.
On his May visit, he’d met an American, a bachelor like James, now living in Mexico City. Alan Taulbee was a former radio announcer turned PR man; his main client was the Mexican government, organizer of the annual road race on the Pan-American Highway, the Carrera Panamericana. (The 1955 event had recently been suspended, after eighty-three spectators were killed at the June motor rally in Le Mans, France.) Taulbee lived in the snug penthouse of the Hotel Prince on Calle Louis Moya. He had connections, locals and expats both, and moved in Mexico City’s discreet but active gay circles. He took James to several Turkish baths, where one could find an old and lively male culture of socializing and sex, if one knew how to read and respect long-established codes.
One day, freed from his obligations with Guth, James met Taulbee at a restaurant to lunch on steak au poivre. Taulbee had invited a friend, someone he wanted James to meet. José Jorge Carlos de Jesús Palomino y Cañedo was lean-faced, aristocratic, and handsome. Jorge was forty-seven, a genealogist and man of culture, from a wealthy family in Guadalajara. His wife had left him three years earlier.
Close to four o’clock, after their long lunch, and slightly drunk, James, Jorge, and Taulbee went to the bullfights at the titanic Plaza Mexico ring, thundering with shouts and the stamping of feet and dueling trumpet bands. They watched lithe, youthful matadors in tight sequined and gold-embroidered trajes, with pink stockings and red-lined capes, make balletic passes in the leisurely sport of formal, ritualized slaughter, as fifty thousand spectators cried “OLÉ!” at the top of their lungs. They drank beer in their wooden box. They munched on peanuts electro-charged with chile and lime.
After the fights, Taulbee suggested they all have dinner. He chose a trendy restaurant: the Mauna Loa, a place like Trader Vic’s in San Francisco, with Polynesian décor and Chinese food. James thought everything tasted atrocious, though after a day of being partially, functionally inebriated, they all got well and fully blitzed on rum drinks. And actually, James realized next morning, waking with a hangover to regard the colonial sumptuousness of his bedroom at the Guth hacienda, just being in the presence of Jorge made him feel a little drunk. James had never met anyone quite like him.
Two days later, again free of Guth, James spent an afternoon and an evening with his new friend. Jorge loved to drink, to go out and stay out late—at bars, nightclubs, and crowded house parties where all the guests were men. He displayed sharp intelligence, at least until he got good and ripped. And what he said about his family history and the numerous cuisines of Mexico, so vast as to be practically unknowable by one person in a single lifetime, was fascinating.
Jorge had lent James his grandmother’s handwritten cookbook; Guth was translating it. James was ecstatic. He wrote to Helen. He described the Palomino y Cañedo family (without naming them) as one of Mexico’s most distinguished. “These are family recipes from before the Empire and are fabulous,” he told her. “I shall have them all and we shall see what we can do with some of them. . . . It is fabulous and wonderful reading.”
James had been so drowned in work and obligation, so exhausted and depressed, he hadn’t allowed himself to fall in love with anyone. His fling with Ate de Boer felt as though it had ended ages ago. Since then, James had been ill and become so fat. He’d come to believe no one would want to spend time with him. Mexico, with its baths full of married men who came to be with and touch other men and never speak of it; even the way men on the street dressed to be looked at, adored like young matadors; and of course Jorge, who embodied a long, proud history: All this gave James hope that a fascinating world of understanding did exist, if only quietly. Here was comfort that, in a bathhouse on a sequestered block in Mexico City smelling of tortillas and detergent, where sticky jacaranda blossoms carpeted the street in purple, there were men who’d never heard of him or seen his picture but knew exactly who he was.
As much as James had come to Mexico to be Francis Guth’s gourmet-for-hire, he’d come to be anonymous—to lose himself temporarily before he had to go home, feel it all roaring back, and sense the gray chasm opening again.
Taulbee and James made the winding, perilous, six-hour trip to Acapulco, Taulbee driving and dodging dogs, cattle, and boulders on the roadway. They spent four days looking at the Pacific, eating carnitas, tamales, and avocado soup, drinking in hotel bars, and watching boys dive from the heights of La Quebrada. Back in Mexico City, James went to the baths again before flying home to New York, with a layover in Los Angeles.
The original plan had been for the Browns to drive their Coronet convertible from Pasadena to Mexico City, pick up James, and all drive home together, stopping to explore as they went—a Mexican version of their northwestern road trip of 1954. They needed to talk about writing another book together, or at least having a proposal to offer Doubleday, as stipulated in their contract, despite the fiasco of the outdoor book. Helen, however, killed the idea of the Mexico trip.
“It is definitely off,” she told Schaffner. “We are broke, [Philip] can’t get away at that time and everyone, including my doctor says ‘NO.’ It’s too hot this time of year.” She worried about James surviving an arduous car journey. “The trip back in all that heat might kill Jim.” James was annoyed, but it was probably better this way. Bitterness over how the book turned out still lingered, as did Helen’s fury about his betrayal and dishonesty. Best not to spend weeks together confined to the brocade upholstery of a car rolling through a foreign country.
Yes, James used people, even (perhaps especially) the friends most loyal to him. But he considered what he gave them in return as part of the transaction. He was always generous with the Browns, forever talking up Helen to anyone in New York who’d listen, constantly angling for opportunities for her. What was taking credit for a few recipes here and there against that?
Less than two months later, in September, James saw Jorge again—at the small apartment Jorge kept on East Fifty-Seventh in Manhattan. They dined that night at Johnny Johnston’s Charcoal Room, a swank steakhouse on Second Avenue and East Forty-Fifth.
They saw each other again four months later, in January 1956, this time in Paris. James had sailed for Genoa in December; he was taking a six-week vacation through Florence, Nice, Aix-en-Provence, Bordeaux (where he’d be installed as a Commandeur de Bontemps de Médoc, thanks to Sam Aaron), Paris, and London. He spent three days with Jorge in Paris. They dined together five times, once at Maxim’s, where James arranged a romantic menu, simple and lush, for two: foie gras frais, poularde aux Champagne, and a dessert of pears.
“Worth the price,” he noted in his datebook, and underlined it heavily.
: : :
FELIX’S RESTAURANT AT 154 West Thirteenth Street in the Village was a bit of a hole, but at least it was dark and stayed open late. You walked slightly down to the door on the ground floor of a brownstone, past the host stand and into the bar, which seemed windowless because the heavy front curtains were always closed. If James stretched out both his arms, they’d probably take up half the width of the place; no more than twenty people could drink in there. Through a dark curtain at the far end was the restaurant, big enough for maybe seventy. Though it was close (cozy if you were optimistic, or were happy-drunk or in love), and you never went when New York was the least bit muggy, you felt enveloped—or, to be accurate, protected. Because Felix’s was one of those peculiar places in the Village where, if you were a gentleman who behaved yourself, you could entertain another gentleman without the owner, Felice De Gregorio, or his son Felix Jr., tossing your mink coat and your bonnet at you and telling you to get out.
Somewhere back in time, Felice had sung with the Chicago Opera Company and the San Carlo Opera Company (so they said, though James was dubious), and perhaps he’d learned to be tolerant of the boys. But the clientele, or the mugginess, or the stubborn reek of the drains wasn’t why Felix’s was a hole. That was due, as James knew better than anyone, to the food.
You could get fish or frog legs Provençale, and dinner came with spaghetti or ravioli, bean soup, and salad (Clementine Paddleford had called it “middle price, middle good,” and that about summed it up). The gimmick was that every so often somebody stood up or walked to the center of the room to sing an aria: maybe Ralph, the baritone waiter who’d been there forever; maybe one of the customers, a boy who’d had the right number of drinks; maybe Felice himself, for a few lines of “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci. On that night in April 1956, the food didn’t matter. Because that night James, who had come to Felix’s to escape, ran into some friends. At their table was a forty-two-year-old architect’s draftsman with the firm Harrison & Abramovitz. He was an Italian with a quiet manner, kind eyes, a soft accent, and a delicious dimpled chin that looked sculpted from marzipan. They introduced him as Gino.
Gino Pasquale Cofacci was born in 1914 in Bologna, to Benedetta Camastro Cofacci and her husband, Davide. While Gino was still a boy, the family (now including a girl, Elena) moved to Rome. The Cofaccis grew close to their neighbors, an Austrian family named Taussig. The father, Stefan, was a professor of geography; eventually he landed a job at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1939, at age twenty-five, and with Stefan Taussig and his wife as hosts and sponsors, Gino immigrated to the United States to enroll at Cornell, in the School of Architecture. America instituted the draft in October 1940, and in July 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, Gino was inducted.
If he had been born in Japan, Gino would have been discharged and interned to a relocation camp when war was declared. As an Italian alien, he was able to keep serving. By 1942, because of his drafting skills, Gino was named Technician Fourth Grade and carried the rank of sergeant. He was part of an engineers’ outfit, designing airstrips and airfields in the Pacific, working one beat behind advance units as they opened new fronts: across the north coast of New Guinea, through Indonesia, and to the Philippines, always prone to attack. Gino received an honorable discharge in July 1945 and returned to Ithaca to pick up his studies. He became a Gargoyle (a member of Cornell’s architectural society), and in 1948, at age thirty-four, received his bachelor’s degree.
In James’s gaze, Gino was a gorgeous individual from the kind of fascinating foreign places James found ripe with escape and understanding. He was odd and funny, this Gino, alternately shy and almost shockingly frank, blurting out observations and opinions in a way other people didn’t, socially. The bad spaghetti and overcooked fish and tortured singing receded into a barely noticeable periphery. The next night, James had Gino to dinner at his apartment.
Three days later, he had Gino over again, this time for Saturday lunch. James invited John Ferrone to join them for the spread: a few cold hors d’oeuvres followed by tête de veau, a boned and poached calf’s head served with vinaigrette. Afterward no dessert, only cheese.
James took care with the calf’s head, preparing it the way Sandy Watt’s butcher in Paris told James to do it: meat and tongue served first, then the more delicate brains as a separate course. And the vinaigrette, instead of shocking with a jolt of acidity, had to be soft, herbaceous, and capery in a way that underlined rather than erased. Gino was such a strange and gentle person, one who seemed to wear thought and emotion on his skin; James sensed that subtlety would not be lost on him.
They all three lingered, drinking wine, until the afternoon shifted almost imperceptibly into the first hints of evening. After Ferrone left, James twisted the blinds closed and they moved to his bed; with fine draftsman’s hands, Gino traced everything on James body, not shying or pulling away.
James was captivated; probably (and for the first time), he was in love.