CHAPTER 13
PERDITA BAKES A LAYER CAKE
1956–1959
AT THE END OF 1955, Frank Schoonmaker had asked James to be his collaborator on a monumental book about wine. Schoonmaker, born in 1905 in South Dakota, was one of the world’s best-known authorities on wine. Soon after Prohibition ended, he opened an import business in New York City, promoting winemakers rather than shippers, and authored The Complete Wine Book for Simon and Schuster. By 1940, he’d begun selling American wines, lifting their status. It was Schoonmaker who convinced California winemakers to abandon the European regional designations they’d been using and instead give their wines names that combined location with the dominant grape varietal: “Livermore Chardonnay” instead of “California Chablis,” for instance, or “Fountain Grove Sonoma Pinot Noir” instead of “California Burgundy.” Schoonmaker’s polished writing for The New Yorker, Gourmet, and Holiday educated a generation about wine. He was an architect of American wine culture.
Reaching out to James to be his collaborator was a mark of respect. James recognized it as an honor. “I have always admired Frank and feel that he has done more for California wines than anyone,” he told Helen.
In 1956, as spring arrived, James and Schoonmaker were under contract with Random House to deliver a large book: how to buy and appreciate wine, how to cook with it, and which wine to pair with what. They had a deadline of July 1, 1957, and received an advance of one thousand dollars each. They’d need time and freedom from distractions to write it, so Schoonmaker decided that Spain would be perfect for knuckling down. He had been sent there during the war as a spy for the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the CIA. Now he owned a house at the north end of the Costa Brava, a hundred miles up the shore from Barcelona, in Palamós. It was once a quiet fishing village, but the government of Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator—eager for tourist cash—decreed that Palamós would become the Mediterranean’s newest international beach resort. Hotels were rising.
Schoonmaker and his wife, Marina, would rent a nearby villa for James. He and Schoonmaker could spend the summer banging out an outline and typing stacks of draft pages, four thousand miles from their editors and persistent telephones in New York. Somehow, James had a bad feeling about all of this: the trip, the book. He’d heard Schoonmaker had originally planned to write it with Jeanne Owen. Maybe James said yes to Schoonmaker because he was flattered to be asked, or because John Schaffner told him he should do it, or because he wanted to feel he’d surpassed Jeanne. Yet James found himself numb to the work.
Slated to sail at the beginning of June, James canceled at the last minute. He flew to Madrid three weeks later and arrived in Palamós on July 6. What was he supposed to do in Spain for two months without Gino?
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PALAMÓS WAS PICTURESQUE ENOUGH. Wine grapes grew in clearings on the scrubby hills within sight of the ocean. Once the fishermen were through for the day, rows of sardine boats covered the fine sand beaches. The town was overrun with French and British tourists, however, joined by budget-conscious Americans looking for a cheaper stretch of the Mediterranean to splash in than the swanky waves lapping the Côte d’Azur. Together, they ensured that local restaurants would be touristic and dull.
“I am not the person to settle down to a routine of a beach resort in Europe any more,” James wrote to Schaffner. “It seems to have charm and grace and drive, but the food is not good and the cooking is not good and I really would prefer being somewhere else to put it quite honestly.”
The Schoonmakers weren’t getting along. “Marina is a boring bitch and fights with Frank constantly,” James reported to his agent. “It is really difficult. If I had a car or something for escape or if Gino came here for vacation it would be a different thing.” They were making little progress on the book. Schoonmaker’s gout had flared up. He spent hours in bed every day.
“Marina came over here to vent her spleen because Frank is in bed,” James wrote Helen, “and two hours of her extreme bitchiness drove me to drink and Miltown.” (James had started taking the tranquilizer—its chemical name was meprobamate—earlier that year for anxiety and depression.) God only knows why he’d agreed to come to Palamós.
He was annoyed at Schaffner for prodding him. “As you remember,” James wrote, “I did not really want to come over this summer—and I was right. I am sure that there will be no major work done on this project until [Frank and I] are separated again.” He asked Schaffner to send him a telegram in care of Frank and Marina with some bogus explanation for why James needed to be back in New York by the third week of August. “This will be the official out.”
Spain did have mitigating charms. His little villa came with a housekeeper who cooked, Mercedes Figueras. She was small and slight, with dark eyes and a soulful look, like a face in a Coptic portrait. Some mornings James met her early at the market. He watched her make tortillas de patatas (thick potato omelets), the Catalan garlic mayonnaise called allioli, and paella. One day he told his agent, “We have just finished a magnificent lunch of Mercedes[’] version of a paella, superb and delicate in its mixture of flavors and seasonings.”
And the men of Palamós were beyond words. “I wish you could visit here,” he wrote to Schaffner, “and see the quality of the fisherboys—something really classic and indescribable. I feel that Franco has chosen the right people for the right jobs.”
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WITH SCHOONMAKER LAID UP and in misery, James escaped to Barcelona on a crowded train. He checked in at the Ritz. He went to Bel y Cía, the esteemed clothier on Paseo de Gracia, where a tailor measured him for shirts with subtle pastel stripes, a suit, and a camel’s hair coat, to be made and sent to New York. He met a friend from Houston, Jack Raglin, who worked in public affairs for Conoco. They dined late at Los Caracoles in the Gothic Quarter (“the slums,” as James described it to Schaffner) on fresh sardines and chicken, next to the front wall of doors that folded back to let diners feel part of the sidewalk. James found it enthralling: the food, and the easy way Catalans carried on in public; the narrow streets and medieval buildings. And he had an eye for the hustlers, their poses and swagger; the aura of unrepressed sexuality.
“You sit on the street and are cruised by everything in the world,” he told Schaffner, “and there are all sorts of hawkers and photographers and practically everything in the world which makes for color. Even Tennessee Williams cruising the cripples like mad.”
The Random House advance was boring a hole in James’s pocket. He shopped for antiques. “I have seen a sofa I want so badly here,” he wrote to Schaffner, “that I am almost ready to hock my soul—I know I can’t make that much from my body.” It was Catalan, eighteenth century. “I look like an old king of Spain—I hope I have the sex right[—]when I’m sitting on it[. . . .]” In fact, it made him feel like a glorious old queen.
Even though exile in Palamós was agony for James, money gave him ways to find the charm of living. Especially when he thought of returning home to Gino, whose letters had been wonderful.
James felt effervescent. “I find myself more and more attracted by this person,” he told Schaffner. “Overwhelmingly so, in fact. I shall have to see what comes out of it all when I get back. But it is surely completely enthralling to me at this point.”
Still, even for a man temporarily at ease with the world, being queer brought fear and anxiety. Near the end of James’s time in Spain, a friend came to stay in his villa. Robert Tyler Lee was an art director and set designer working for CBS television in Los Angeles (he’d received an Emmy nomination the previous year for his work on Shower of Stars). James met Lee and his live-in boyfriend, Robert Checchi (also a set decorator and designer), through Eleanor Peters. Lee planned to spend a week with James in Spain before flying to Cuba, where Checchi was working on interior designs for the Havana Hilton, then in the planning stage.
When Lee got to James’s villa, he was distraught: Six weeks had passed since he last heard from Checchi. Had he been picked up on the street for loitering? Entrapped at a bar where queers were known to gather by President Batista’s goons and locked in a Cuban prison? Lee couldn’t ask Checchi’s employer without raising suspicions, or revealing outright that he was homosexual, thus getting him fired.
James asked his agent to make discreet inquiries. “I fell upon the idea of asking you to make a call and find out what you can,” James told Schaffner. “It will be a great favor to me—but then it seems you are always doing me favors.” Lee reached out to Schaffner, too, pleading for help. “I hope he isn’t in such a position of job or such that [he’s] embarrassed to write. . . . Please remember that he is quiet, full of pride and dignity,” Lee wrote. So much complicated delicacy was needed to navigate a queer life.
Schaffner wired Lee to tell him Checchi was fine, merely unable to write, and phoning from Cuba was out of the question. Soon, Lee would be on his way to Havana for a reunion, and James, just three months after meeting Gino, was already trying to figure out how they could live together. Discreetly.
Schoonmaker rallied in time to rough out parts of the Random House project before James needed to return to New York. It was to be a book of menus, organized by season and occasion, with appropriate wines. There were other cookbooks that mentioned the seasons, but none took the seasonality of dishes as an organizing theme. “It is going to be revolutionary in some ways,” James told his agent. But there was a hell of a lot more to do.
A month after he got home, James rented the empty apartment on the first floor of his building at 36 West Twelfth. Gino could have the bedroom in the new unit, while James would use the rest as his office, keeping his bedroom—officially—in the existing unit upstairs. For anyone who didn’t know that they slept together, they’d seem like roommates.
Introducing Gino to Helen by letter, James described him as “an architect and rather a swell guy.”
Gino filled both apartments with houseplants and worked, despite James’s naturally sloppy habits, to keep things clean and tidy. Gino’s mind demanded order and precision; it thrived on detail. When Isabel asked him for help translating recipes from the Italian original of Ada Boni’s Il Talismano della Felicità, Gino took on the assignment like a grad student. He researched unfamiliar Italian dialects so he could understand the regional ingredient names Boni used. He spent hours at the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street, poring over Italian dictionaries and researching the peninsula’s edible frogs and songbirds before reporting back to Isabel.
Gino was capable of infinite patience, yet in social situations he seemed unable to buffer his opinions with politeness or observe the usual conventions. If after-dinner lingerers in the living room on Twelfth Street bored him, he’d say so aloud before retreating to his bedroom. Some of those closest to James, including John Ferrone, thought Gino unworthy of their friend. More and more, they treated Gino not as someone at the center of James’s emotional life but as his irritating roommate. Everyone seemed happier after Gino had gone to bed.
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ANDRÉ SURMAIN HAD the grace, carnality, and alabaster whiteness of a young satyr sculpted by Praxiteles. He was born André Sussman in Cairo in 1920. His parents founded Aziza Cosmetics and distilled perfumes using Cognac as a base. André grew up in Paris and served in the French army before fleeing to New York in 1940. He served the American war effort as an operative in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and was sent back to Europe, parachuting into France six weeks before D-day. He changed his name to Surmain to hide that he was Jewish, in case he fell into German hands.
In the early 1950s, Surmain was working in New York with Serge Obolensky, his old OSS colleague, in public relations. In 1953, when James was chasing research and recipes for his fish book, he met André and Obolensky, PR men for New Bedford scallops. André had been running a catering company for first-class in-flight meals out of his brownstone on East Fiftieth Street, first for Varig, the Brazilian national airline, loading stacked trays into his turquoise VW bus and driving out to Idlewild Airport with his Greek chef. In time, Surmain converted an old barn near Idlewild into a commissary. He called his company Epicure Kitchens. Besides Varig, he produced in-flight meals for the Mexican airline Aeronave, eventually renamed Aeroméxico.
Surmain started a gourmet club, Les Ambassadeurs du Bien Manger, and ferried a dozen or so members out to his Idlewild barn for opulent French dinners. He was ambitious and arrogant, sexy in a way that combined savageness and femininity, and a womanizer. James would remember this young man of looks and drive. He might be useful. But it was Surmain’s wife, Nancy, who first stoked James’s entrepreneurial fires.
Born Nancy Wormser into a comfortable Scarsdale family, she was creative, stylish, and had flair. She married André in 1953 and oversaw the conversion of his four-story East Fiftieth Street brownstone into a rambling home. She opened a fashionable boutique on East Fifty-Second and named it Chauncey’s; it had a small but chic selection of gourmet items, including caviar and foie gras in cans. One day when James was visiting Chauncey’s in early spring 1955, Nancy asked whether he’d consider teaching a cooking class in the shop.
Soon Nancy, André, James, and Ruth Norman were talking about starting a cooking school. Cookbook author Helen Worth had one, and she was acid tongued and awful, in James’s opinion. Dione Lucas had a famous school on the Upper West Side, run out of her apartment in the Dakota. “If Dione,” James asked Helen Evans Brown, “why not us[,] who are honest[?]”
At the end of November 1955, James and André decided to make a variety of pricey, elegant pâtés to sell at Chauncey’s, in time for holiday parties. With James’s name and recipes and André’s marketing skill, the pâté pop-up was a sensation. They even charmed the skeptical Sheila Hibben of The New Yorker, James’s old nemesis. “Mrs. Hibben is now begging André and Nancy with my aid to do soups,” James wrote to Helen in Pasadena. “She is determined that we are going to be the epicurean shop of New York.”
By spring 1956, as James and his new partners were planning a cooking school located in the Surmains’ brownstone, he was partnering with them in other ways. Together, they worked out a publicity campaign for O’Quin’s Charcoal Sauce, a tomatoey condiment husky with liquid smoke. They did a luncheon, including jellied eggs with O’Quin’s sauce, for food editors. Nancy assembled swag baskets containing a gingham tablecloth and napkins, hen figurines, bottles of O’Quin’s, and the company’s sham story, spelled out in André’s longhand, about its having been around since before the American Revolution.
Schaffner and Helen thought James was squandering his reputation on endorsements of questionable products; they marveled at the sheer number of his commitments. He seemed only too eager to piss away his time on Skotch Grills and O’Quin’s Charcoal Sauce. “He divides himself into many fragments,” Schaffner mused to Helen, “and it must be an exhausting experience and in many cases unrewarding, emotionally as well as financially.”
Helen wrote back: “I . . . wish he would decide what he wants of life, and do it.”
James’s pursuit of piddling jobs was partly that: a restless search for what he wanted from life. Perhaps he’d find one that stuck, something that would bring bring him happiness. His commitments were piling up: the long recipe inserts, called “cook books,” for House & Garden; his Corkscrew columns on wine for the same magazine (all the result of patient editing by Isabel Callvert, who went uncredited); stories for Collier’s on beans and picnics, collaborations with Helen, who did most of the work and all of the seething about it; the book he’d begun with Schoonmaker. There was something unfulfilling about each of them, yet each was something he couldn’t chuck.
He began to open distance between himself and the gourmet label he once sought. In a late 1955 interview for P.S. from Paris, humorist Art Buchwald’s syndicated column, James blasted the very word by which he was known: gourmet. James felt that epicure was a better, more honest label, because gourmet had become such a cliché. In fact, it was a not-very-subtle jab at the Wine and Food Society of New York and Jeanne Owen, its self-styled “gourmette.” James said he didn’t consider large gourmet societies to be serious organizations. “The gourmet vintage 1956 wants sauces and elaborate dishes,” James told Buchwald. “Some of them are so bollixed up he doesn’t know what in the devil he’s eating. The epicure wants to preserve the simple dishes. To him scrambled eggs can be a work of art.” America was churning out food snobs by the thousands. James told Buchwald he’d started his own club, the Society for the Suppression of the Word Gourmet in America—a joke with a serious shadow.
Ever since he was a boy, when Elizabeth took him to adult parties and had him shock and delight the room by airing precocious judgments, James had craved the attention that came from flexing surprising opinions.
Buchwald asked him to name the ten best restaurants in the country. James’s list was mostly conventional (Le Pavillon, “21,” and Quo Vadis in New York; Jack’s in San Francisco; the London Chop House in Detroit) but with a populist twist: the Pancake House in Portland, where the scrambled eggs were artistry and James would always just be lovable old Jimmy.
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THE COOKING SEMINAR was coming together. James and André were now a public relations and promotions company for food. They called it André Surmain Associates (James appeared on the masthead as “consultant”). There was so much space in the Surmains’ house on East Fiftieth that James planned to move his office there, his books and files. “We shall have a test kitchen and room for the lessons,” James told Helen, “room for photography and enough office space for anything we want.” Classes were scheduled to start in the first week of October 1956: four lessons, once a week, with ten students in each. Because of James’s name, they were filling up by word of mouth alone, including food editors and magazine people: two each from Life magazine and the New York Times.
They were to be hands-on classes; afterward, they’d all sit together at the dining table, eat and drink wine, and discuss what they’d cooked—an echo of André’s gourmet dinner club in the Idlewild barn. James and Ruth Norman worked out an intricate syllabus of high-level dishes, as laid out for Helen:
We are giving a complete menu with variations. For instance one will have a Canape Marquise for a tidbit, a spinach and cheese soufflé for the hors d’oeuvre, three different kinds of duck with accompaniments, a vegetable and for dessert another type of soufflé—such as the lemon one with no flour or a regular ginger one. In this way the soufflé question, the duck question, the vegetables styling will all be covered with one lesson. In another we shall have for instance turkey, capon and goose with various stuffings. We expect to work it so that everyone works every different station in the course of work. Then when one sits at dinner it becomes a seminar.
In September, they sent postcards to everyone they knew. It showed a cartoon James, in chef’s toque and long apron sheathing his enormous bulk, carrying a steaming roast goose on a platter. “JAMES BEARD and ANDRE SURMAIN are happy to announce the opening of a COOKING SEMINAR meeting once a week . . . at our offices and test kitchen, 249 East 50th Street, New York City.”
They began with forty paid students and invited a few members of the media to attend for free. At the last minute, James and Ruth simplified the first session, to make it friendlier for novices: an hors d’oeuvre spread, chicken three ways, corn bread, salad, a layer cake. “Not exciting but the right thing for a beginning class,” James explained to Helen. “For some reason I am looking forward to the classes because of the fact I am such a ham I guess.”
One of the students for that first session was Perdita Schaffner, who almost never cooked. “You will be fascinated to hear that the James Beard–Surmain cooking school is a terrific success so far,” John Schaffner reported to Helen. “It is particularly so for one Perdita Schaffner, who made her first layer cake on her first lesson, along with learning five hundred other things.”
The day after the class was Schaffner’s birthday. Perdita asked James whether she could buy the cake she made, to take home to her husband. The cake, glorious with candles and a beaming Perdita to present it, was beautiful and delicious. James’s restlessness, his false starts and frustrations, melted away when he was teaching. He’d found his stage, the spotlight he’d been seeking for thirty years. He’d become the master of ceremonies for a complex orchestrated performance that felt easy and natural. A show that made everyone happy.
“I think the class is going to do wonderful things for Perdita,” Schaffner told Helen, “and Jim’s method of teaching is apparently so sympathetic and disarming that all of her fears and lack of self-confidence have vanished quite away. I know she is looking forward with all of the eagerness of a child to a party toward the next lesson. I do think this is quite wonderful, don’t you?”