CHAPTER 18
SALMON QUICHE À LA CARL
1972–1976
CARL JEROME WAS twenty-three and a faggot. Not politely or apologetically homosexual, not ambivalently gay, not ashamed or embarrassed, and not particularly interested in hearing what you had to say about it. Maybe you bookmarked the Bible passages condemning sodomy to use as talking points, rehearsed your disapproval, vaunted your doubts, professed your “tolerance,” as long as men didn’t act like girls or flame in the streets. That was your hang-up. Carl really didn’t give a damn, which, honestly, would come to rather frighten James. And it would turn him on.
Carl had eyes like the mirror glaze on top of a bittersweet chocolate gâteau. He was bearded and hunky without being a muscle queen. Through the Oxford dress shirt Carl had donned before venturing to West Tenth Street to meet the Dean of American Cookery, James could sense the furriness of Carl’s chest. You’d also see the same blue jeans he wore to brunch at the Eagle or a night at the Mineshaft, because Carl wasn’t giving those up for anything. He’d worked for the right to flaunt them.
Carl was raised in the South. He was Jewish, a Yankee born in Brooklyn, and queer—in 1960s South Carolina, those were three strikes that had you out, and could literally get you knocked out cold on some sidewalk. Carl grew up learning how to carve protected spaces for himself, and he knew when to punch to defend them. But even the best fighter eventually gets tired. After college, where he studied sociology and psychology, he knew he had to escape, to move to New York City for an authentic existence in the capital of gay liberation.
Carl arrived in Manhattan at the start of summer 1972, looking for a job. He tried driving a taxi; it wasn’t his scene. Food was the only thing Carl was really into. He tried cooking in restaurants but lasted only a few months (the adrenaline rush terrified him). A friend, Annemarie Huste, had been Jackie Onassis’s private chef, until she blabbed to Weight Watchers about the ex–Mrs. Kennedy’s diet and got herself fired. Jackie wanted her back. Annemarie declined. Instead, she recommended Carl, who’d taken a cooking course that summer and learned to make a few French dishes Jackie happened to love. The job paid $150 a week.
After lunch at Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartment on day three of Carl’s tenure, the forty-three-year-old former first lady praised his cooking, especially his coeur à la crème, which she declared the lightest she’d ever had. But the next day she fired him. He asked too many personal questions, she said (he swore later that he’d asked none). After that, Carl spread a little dirt around for Washington Post syndicated columnist Maxine Cheshire. He told her Jackie’s silver serving trays were pathetic, and her glasses were just that: glass, not crystal. He described the scandalous state of the kitchen, creeping with roaches, dry goods flecked with weevils.
Details of the family’s shabby circumstances rippled through the many dailies that ran Cheshire’s column. The lesson? No one should mess with Carl. He’d survived being gay in the South and besides, a liberated faggot did not go out like that, at the whim of a rich lady, without making some noise. It put him back where he’d started, though. Carl needed a job.
The thing to do, he decided, was try to work for a famous cook who could put him on the map. Julia, he knew, lived all the way up in Cambridge, so he wrote a beseeching letter to Craig Claiborne. Claiborne didn’t answer. Carl then read that the James Beard Cooking School was ten blocks from his place in the Village. He looked in the telephone book and voilà: James A. Beard. He rang and the great man came on the line. James told him to stop by the house and they’d talk. It felt like a job interview, only Carl didn’t know what the job was.
Carl looked nervous, James noted, and overwhelmed: by the house, by James’s cologne, which Carl asked about, and James said it was from a London shop, Floris. They talked for twenty minutes—Carl was looking to get into food and wondered whether Mr. Beard had any suggestions. James knew this scenario: young and inexperienced person dazzled to meet the famous James Beard, who would give them a few platitudes about making it in the business before telling them to seek out a culinary school. Perhaps Mommy and Daddy could send them to the École Hôtelière in Lausanne? But Carl seemed different from the others.
James gave him a tour, pointing out the operatic wallpaper with the pineapples and the leaves that looked like flesh. James explained that pineapples were symbols of hospitality, with the frisson he’d put on that word, for the right guest, as a hint that maybe Carl could stick around and they could get to know each other. Carl didn’t seem to notice—or, if he did, he didn’t flinch. After he left, for days James couldn’t stop thinking about Carl. So he called the number he’d scribbled on a notepad and asked him to come work for him. Clay, who’d been listening, gave James a look. James said Oh, now Babes, they’d find something for the young man to do.
On his first day, Carl opened mail. And since he’d been a cab driver, he became James’s official driver—although James didn’t own a car, and there were always taxis and hired limos and friends to provide rides uptown to Quo Vadis or the Met Opera.
At the end of his first day, after there was no more mail to open or answer and the telephone had slowed and Clay didn’t need him to haul anything else down to the basement, Carl told James he was leaving and that he’d see him the following morning. James was seated on a couch.
James asked Carl if he could kiss him good-bye. Maybe he went too far, after Carl bent down, aiming for his lips instead of the cheek Carl offered, forcing Carl’s mouth open to slip his tongue inside. Carl was a young man who could take care of himself, James thought. From the way Carl pulled back, James saw that he’d startled him. Carl hurried from the house, down the stairs and into the street. Another look from Clay.
Let’s see if he comes back, James’s shrug said, and next day he did. This time, though, when Carl said goodnight, James noticed he was standing eight feet away.
: : :
A NEW CLASS CYCLE was starting, and it was part of Carl’s job, now that he was an adjunct of James’s household, to observe it, standing by, ready to fetch any forgotten thing. José (pronounced Josie) Wilson, ex–food editor for House & Garden, was James’s assistant for the classes, taking the place of Ruth Norman and the late Paula Peck.
The class was appalling. James was distant and removed, literally and figuratively. No longer did he stand at the center of his classroom grand piano, giving his students close instruction. After the cooking lesson, when everyone sat down to eat, James and José sat off by themselves, sequestered in the kitchen while the students ate in the salon. A dozen people had paid a stiff fee for a class with the Dean of American Cookery, and he was only peripherally there.
The next day, James asked Carl what he thought of the class. Carl said it was terrible. He didn’t think the students learned anything. James’s teaching was poor, and when the lesson was over, James and José should have eaten with the students, not at their own table in the kitchen.
Carl was a bulldog. James saw his ambition; he asked Carl to assist with the classes. At the next class, James took his new assistant’s advice. He stood in the center of the U-shaped counter. Later he sat with the students.
Though James hadn’t realized it, it’s what he’d been looking for: a new identity for the school, new energy and vitality, a youthfulness and focus James hadn’t felt in some time. Even before Carl reached his six-month anniversary as assistant at the James Beard Cooking School, James named him director. José faded from the classes.
James had good reason to want to inject fresh blood into the school. By 1971, the number of home-based cooking schools in New York City had surged. Would-be students could choose from dozens of classes. You could learn basic Chinese cooking in Grace Chu’s apartment on the Upper West Side; in a modern kitchen upstairs from the Oriental Country Store on Mott Street in Chinatown, you could learn to make the recipes Virginia Lee had picked up recently in Taiwan and Hong Kong; you could master regional Northern Italian cooking in Marcella Hazan’s kitchen on West Fifty-Fifth Street; immerse yourself in the cuisines of Mexico with Diana Kennedy (advanced instruction in tamales and mole Poblano was extra); learn French cooking in Lydie Marshall’s renovated brownstone in the West Village; and take private lessons of your choice at the Upper East Side home of Helen Worth, whose shtick was technique, what she called her “reasons-behind-the-recipes” method.
The most stylish classes were in the Upper East Side apartment of Perla Meyers. With minimal makeup, an unfussy hairstyle, and a penchant for wide slacks that flared to the hems, Meyers captured the mood of health-conscious Manhattan in 1973. She was born in Vienna and had lived in France, Spain, and West Germany. She spent summers in Europe, as an unpaid stagiaire in a different multistarred restaurant every year. In her cooking school, which she called the International Kitchen, she talked about cooking with the seasons, about shopping for produce just harvested or growing your own, about cooking with a light touch: no heavy sauces to mask the deliciousness of ingredients in their pristine state.
James, of course, had been writing about buying from farms and market stalls and European “peasant food” for years, but Perla Meyers provided a generational shift. Instead of advice and opinion from an old man with jowls and a body that represented excess, Meyers delivered a gospel of fresh, seasonal cooking with an implied connection to health and vigor and looking amazing, living close to the garden not as a hippie but as a young, stylish New Yorker equally at home in Paris or Milan.
James’s fussy antique crockery, wallpapers, and copper lavabo mounted on the wall seemed fuddy-duddy. He still had Carl—James’s “able co-star,” in the words of newspaper cooking columnists Carolyn Flournoy and Marilee Harter. They noticed James’s “black-haired, bearded young associate.” Carl looked good in a showy striped dress shirt with the sleeves folded back to midforearm and a second button at the collar left undone so you saw the patch of chest fur: seductive yet professional. Carl’s hands garnishing a platter of Lamb Marrakesh for a class were sexy, and so was Carl’s backstory —his experiences as a cook, Flournoy and Harter reported, “. . . in the kitchens of the world’s ‘beautiful people,’ ” which must have meant his four infamous days with Jackie and Ari Onassis.
And Carl was smart and capable, with a “computer bank mind . . . quite literally a walking encyclopedia of culinary lore.” James lusted after Carl, yes, but was clear-eyed enough to see the charm his new director exerted on students.
José knew far more than Carl did about food and cooking. She was a talented editor, a good writer—like Isabel and Ferrone before her, she knew how to conjure the timbre of James’s voice to the typed manuscript page. In 1970, she revised and updated How to Eat Better for Less Money for Simon and Schuster, who’d acquired it and thought to capitalize on the US recession that had begun in 1969. It was selling. And while José had a wicked sense of humor, she didn’t exactly show charisma with students. At a time when Perla Meyers and Graham Kerr were stars, Carl swept the dust away from the bric-a-brac. James at sixty-nine lacked the energy and stamina to refresh the classes alone.
Rehabbing the classes was a crucial task. In 1972, James told a writer for Life magazine that he had a waiting list of five hundred—an outrageous boast even for James, and a lie. There was no waiting list. Even if his classes had lost some of their luster, James was still a master of spinning shiny magic.
: : :
HOW ELECTRIC and yet how wearying it was to exist in James Beard’s household. Carl took it all in, every tip and shortcut of the master’s, noting every life lesson and showman’s trick. He studied how to taste and season and trust his senses, and he filed away all the gossip about the writers and editors and PR people he should never trust. James taught Carl how to fake it “on stage,” how to turn a disaster into a demo that got the housewives clapping. James mentored Carl in how to roll into Houston, Cleveland, or Rochester and in ten minutes locate a source for the veal scallops and fresh tarragon that the lazy and incompetent local organizer had failed to find.
Yet James was demanding—constantly, with practically no letup—for twelve or fourteen hours a day. James left Carl no time to have a social life, certainly not a boyfriend. James knew that what he had to offer someone like Carl was a priceless apprenticeship, and James had known from the beginning that Carl had the kind of ambition to make him want to stay—at least for the time being. For anyone who wanted to open a food business or write for the magazines, James’s friendship was crucial. James was grooming his successor, his chosen heir.
And James was hopelessly in love with Carl. Some of James’s closest friends thought James was dangerously in love with Carl. Mary Hamblet, who spoke to James by telephone every Sunday from Portland, knew her old friend was perilously close to losing his judgment, the discretion he’d worked so hard at keeping aloft these many years. She wrote to tell James he was being a fool. Judith Jones called James to tell him his obvious infatuation was unbecoming, as well as dangerous to his public image. It seemed that everyone hated Carl. They gossiped and clucked. They resented his closeness to James. It was throwing everything out of equilibrium, James’s careful balance of private and public.
Carl would get to the house early every day, not long after Clay. James, of course, was an early riser. He often had insomnia and would be bored after making his early calls and eager to get to work. Usually, he would be having breakfast alone; early on, when Carl first started, James would have breakfast with Gino, but then that stopped. James had never really been in love with breakfast anyway.
Carl would get to work sifting papers, opening mail and answering queries, or testing recipes. In 1974, when Little, Brown proposed a revision to James Beard’s Fish Cookery, James went through a copy of the 1954 original with a red felt-tip pen, crossing out recipes that seemed dated and ones he knew didn’t quite work and weren’t worth the time to rehab. Carl had to retest several of the recipes—sometimes three a day to keep up with the publisher’s schedule. Some recipes had to be adapted for the popular new food processors; many others needed to be retimed according to a Canadian method James had recently discovered (ten minutes of cooking for every inch of thickness). Others—like boiled lobster—had been wrong to begin with. When American Cookery came out, Avis DeVoto told James that she and Julia were convinced that the time he’d given for cooking lobsters was shockingly insufficient (“lobsters are so damn expensive that an undercooked one is a real tragedy”). The salmon pie needed to be redeveloped as salmon quiche and there needed to be a footnote about the imminent extinction of the grotto sculpin. The list went on and on.
Carl would cook lunch for anyone who was in the house: James, Clay, and José at the beginning, though later it included Emily Gilder, the office secretary, and of course Gino—he was always somewhere in the rafters now that he’d quit architecture.
Sometimes Clay would cook, since the phone seemed to ring constantly, and in the afternoon there was a lot of paperwork—more letters, doing the planning and logistics for upcoming demos on the road. Dinner was usually out, at the Coach House or Trattoria da Alfredo. James expected Carl to join him. They might go to The Four Seasons, where Tom Margittai and Paul Kovi would lavish them with food, perhaps even a new dish the Swiss-born chef, Seppi Renggli, was developing. They opened bottles for James. A stream of people James knew came by to chat. The meals dribbled on for hours.
There was no structure to the daily schedule. Every hour followed James’s lead, his decision about what to do next. The long, looping days ran on constant orders from James about what to take on next, which critical thing needed attention pronto and which could wait—or maybe stop the thing you started and do this other thing first. There was no filing system. James had baskets where he’d drop papers, many different baskets scattered around his shelves, with no visible sense of order. But if Carl needed to find something—a letter or a recipe or a contract—somehow James knew which basket Carl should search. Carl tried to impose an organizing system; it died being born. James did not want organization, or an end to the chaos and his own relevance.
If things got a little quiet, James would say, “I’m bored, let’s go downstairs and make a recipe for the column,” and Carl would have to follow him to the kitchen and roll up his sleeves. Setting up cooking demos in halls and department stores and suburban-mall cookware boutiques was a physical grind (there was no way James could have managed on his own) yet exhilarating. And the travel was amazing. Carl flew to London and to Venice to make appearances, sitting in first class, with the overflow of attention settling on Carl.
Stewardesses brought drinks and food in never-ending succession. The pilots would come back to pay genial respects and make sure the crew was taking good care of him. The actor Van Johnson, who found himself on a flight with James, asked how he could get into one of his cooking classes. James laughed his twinkly laugh and said the classes were so booked up maybe Johnson would have luck next year, or the year after that. Then he sent Johnson a drink. Less august passengers might approach James nervously and tell him that their wives had just made his recipe for roast beef or salmon loaf or raisin pie. Then they’d ask whether he wouldn’t mind signing a plane-ticket envelope or a cocktail napkin just so she’d believe her husband had actually been on an airplane with the great James Beard and wasn’t just pulling her leg.
Wouldn’t mind? Wouldn’t mind? What a laugh, Carl thought. Absolutely hysterical. Because being asked to sign something—to sign anything—had become James’s purpose. He was always looking for the next younger man to help and perhaps pursue—hoping to conquer him emotionally, which Carl had resisted.
But James had not made peace with having to keep his distance from Carl. He still held out hope that something more intense than the constancy of a business companion was possible. In 1974, they went to Miami together to stage demos for the opening of Burt Wolf’s Good Cooking School in Burdines department store at the Dadeland Mall, a setup graced with palmettos and light. In the hotel, in James’s room, James was seated on the bed, wearing one of the white cotton robes he liked. Carl was talking, distracted, not looking at James.
James undid the tie of his robe and opened it, and he was naked underneath. James went on talking, in the exact same tone he’d used when the robe was closed. He went on casually, calmly talking about some detail of the next day’s class, leaving it up to Carl to decide whether or not to accept this passive offer of a diversion and get closer to the master.
But Carl decided to look away, and James discreetly folded the flaps of his robe back across his midsection. Neither said a word about it later.