CHAPTER 20
RAISIN BREAD REDEMPTION
1971–1981
IN 1971, JUDITH JONES, the feared and admired editor at Alfred A. Knopf, committed herself to shaping James Beard into something he was not, at least not exactly.
In December 1961, when James had escorted Julia Child and Simone Beck and Mastering the Art of French Cooking into the small and bloodthirsty world of New York food—gave Julia and Simca his protection and his blessing—Judith felt a debt of gratitude to James. Like her authors that year, Judith had held no sway in New York food before Mastering took off. Judith had disdained the world of cookbooks and magazines. Even after the clamor for Julia and Simca’s book, Judith didn’t like to think of herself as so lowly a thing as a cookbook editor. She was a literary editor who, between manuscripts by John Updike, lent her time to cookbooks she believed could be extraordinary.
The women who worked as food editors of the big magazines—House Beautiful and McCall’s and House & Garden—Judith had contempt for them. The recipes were uninteresting, all those ghastly mixes and cans and pathetic waxed boxes of frozen vegetables: They made Judith shudder. Could anyone imagine buying them? They were home-ec people, these magazine women. And really, Judith thought, they surely hated food: the beauty and sensuousness of fine ingredients, cooked patiently. They were all secretly out to push Campbell’s this and General Mills that, with recipes those companies promoted to sell their products—printed on cartons of instant mashed potatoes and the like. The horrible home-ec women of American magazine publishing were only out to make a buck. And the cookbooks they wrote: Judith liked to call them “box-top books.”
Still, Judith needed those women to promote her authors. For that, she had James. He’d been so sweet with Julia and Simca, and so jealous of them, poor man.
She pitied James a little, and of course it made her want to laugh, the ridiculousness of pitching products like that portable Skotch Grill, rather than just showing American women how to cook, the way Julia did so beautifully. The Skotch Bucket! But Jim connected with readers. Judith felt he was nowhere near Julia’s level, of course, but he did have knowledge and authority; he knew what was good, and, like Evan—Judith’s husband—James believed in American food, its bounty and variety, the diversity of its regional character. Judith had seen this at one of James’s classes, his way of getting women to put aside their fears of making a soufflé or roasting a chicken. He connected—with women as well as with men. Judith wanted to bring men into the kitchen, and of course into the constituency of cookbook buyers. If the highest goal of a cookbook was to teach technique, Jim Beard had an uncanny ability to make even complicated things look like such fun. Judith wanted him to write a bread cookbook for her.
As the 1970s dawned, bread—wholesome, dark, and peasanty, pebbled with seeds and wheat berries, the antithesis of factory-extruded Wonder loaves—had become a movement. In February 1970, Bloomingdale’s on Third Avenue unveiled the Bread Basket, a boutique selling more than a hundred types from nine artisan bakers: brioche and Bauernbrot, Hungarian potato bread, Russian pumpernickel, and ring-shaped Italian pana con ciccolo, flavored with lard and pork cracklings. Bread’s allure stretched far beyond the Upper East Side of Manhattan. MAGICAL MYSTERIES OF MAKING BREAD, ran the headline for a 1971 Chicago Tribune story on the counterculture phenomenon of The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown, a Zen monk in California.
“Currently there’s a revival in home bread baking,” Mary Daniels wrote for the Tribune story. “Lots of folks are tired of the bland beige pillows stuffed with airy cotton that is sold on supermarket shelves. Deep in their brains are mouth-watering atavistic memories of something much better . . . heavy, crusty, crunchy, chewy, dark, coarse, satisfying rectangles made of stoneground whole grains.”
Shambhala, a hippie publisher in Berkeley nobody had ever heard of, struck gold with Tassajara. Judith knew that a real publisher in New York, if it got its bread cookbook just right, could easily outdo a bunch of counterculture kids—probably unwashed—in California. The New York Times book division was rushing to get a bread-and-soup cookbook on store shelves, but they’d make a mess of it. Knopf could win the bread book game, especially with a byline from James Beard, the master of teaching difficult things. Besides, who else but James had atavistic memories stretching so far into the bread-scented mist of an idyllic past?
Over a few months, starting at the end of 1970, when James was still working on American Cookery, Judith invited James to an informal series of monthly lunches. By early March 1971, they had a letter of agreement for the Bread Cookbook, Judith’s working title. James would deliver the manuscript on October 1, 1972 (a tentative date), with publication in fall 1973, and release of the $7,500 advance only when James could show he was well underway with the manuscript. Separately, James arranged to pay John Ferrone twenty percent of the advance to be his editor and uncredited cowriter.
“I hope you will tell Jim how delighted I am to be getting a book from him at long last,” Judith wrote to John Schaffner. “Everyone I mention it to gets so excited that they can’t wait to get it in their hands.”
Knopf’s preliminary fact sheet for what came to be titled Beard on Bread revealed Judith’s hopes to create the definitive American bread book. “The craze for bread-making is sweeping the country,” it explained. “Everyone is doing it, 6-year-old kids, hippies, business tycoons, restless housewives. This is a book addressed to all types, and Beard is a name they’ll reckon with.”
The final manuscript—one hundred recipes, for everything from basic loaves to donuts, griddlecakes, and pita—reflected Judith’s talent for shaping James’s image. In Beard on Bread, Judith took James’s persona from Delights and Prejudices and American Cookery, a man blessed with a long memory stretching to a golden age in the nation’s food life. Hippies in their twenties may have started the craft bread revolution, reviving old recipes and home baking methods, but in Judith’s molding of James, he was a survivor of those blessed olden times, the elder of American foodways, who bridged generations.
Instead of using photographs of James, she hired an illustrator, Karl Stuecklen, to depict him on the dust jacket not as aged, tired, and puffy (all of which he was) but instead as lithe and dynamic. Stuecklen’s cover portrait shows James’s face as lean and masculine, with an unwrinkled head that doesn’t so much reflect light as beam energy. He’s dressed in a rolled-sleeve shirt of commanding, optimistic yellow, under a single-strap butcher’s apron suggestive of male power. The kitchen around him thrums like a workshop: a bowl of rising dough atop a stockpot billowing like a steam engine, amid a battery of tools and vessels.
Schaffner disliked the way Judith wasn’t just an editor but became de facto literary manager for her authors, shaping their images along with their voices—she was usurping that role from Schaffner. But Schaffner feared her power, as James did, and was careful not to challenge her directly. As soon as he received his advance copy of Beard on Bread, he sent a timid critique. “I have to say I don’t like the jacket,” he told her, “but I have never liked drawings of Jim because they always tend to come out caricatures. True, this one makes him seem a kindly sort and I’m sure his admirers across the land will not complain.”
Stuecklen also did the book’s amber line drawings that illustrated the process: how to stir, knead, and shape dough. For those drawings, James wasn’t the model; Judith had a photographer capture a woman demonstrating those hand techniques, in a studio. In Stuecklen’s finished drawings, those hands have Jamesian plumpness and flair.
In a way, those drawings symbolize Judith’s genius for creating mythic commodities of her authors—because, just like the hands that Stuecklen drew, the recipes didn’t exactly belong to James. Though by the time Beard on Bread hit bookshops, Judith Jones made sure they had the stamp of no one else.
: : :
JAMES SPENT THREE WEEKS in Norway in June 1972, a guest of the Export Council and the National Tourist Office. Gino, still smarting from his spring apprenticeship with Richard Olney, met him in Oslo. (Coincidentally, Norway had decriminalized male-to-male sex two months earlier.) James and Gino walked the open-air folk museum at Bygdøy and the fish market at Bergen; sailed up a fjord and visited a flatbread factory—the Flatbrødfabrikken Ideal—in Hamar. At a farm on the Drammensveien Road outside Oslo, they watched Elizabeth Ovenstad bake a batch of her twice-weekly loaves, rich with wheat kernels, rye and whole-meal flour, and milk.
At the end of June, Gino returned to New York. James flew to Nice. He burrowed in at La Pitchoune with Julia and Paul Child, ostensibly to work. A columnist for The Oregonian’s Northwest magazine and a friend of James’s from Portland, Carl Gohs, arrived to help with the manuscript. When he wasn’t at the typewriter, Gohs scoured boulangeries for typical Provençal breads to set before James.
Yet Scandinavian breads, not French ones, were the core of the hundred recipes in Beard on Bread. They give the book a wholesome identity, cozy and rugged like a Norwegian sweater. If the hippie breads in Tassajara gave a nod to the brown-rice macrobiotic sensibility of Japan, the loaves in Beard on Bread had a footing in Europe, though in brooding landscapes far north of the typical American tourist zone.
Other recipes in the book are uncredited adaptations from James’s stash of paperback Pillsbury Bake-Off books. James’s Dill-Seed Bread, for one, is all but identical to the winner of the 1960 Bake-Off, Dilly Casserole Bread, by Leona Schnuelle of Crab Orchard, Nebraska. Alas, James didn’t mention the hapless Leona. Pita and lamb-topped Lebanese flatbread were uncredited contributions from James’s friend Emil Kashouty.
James’s recipe for Mother’s Raisin Bread added a second layer of deception. In an early draft of the recipe headnote, James wrote: “I grew up on this particular bread and had it toasted and fresh and often on picnics and for tea on Sunday. Sometimes tiny currants and bits of shaved citron were substituted for the raisins but either seems elegant to me. This was my mother’s creation after she had been unsuccessful in getting the Palace Hotel to give here [sic] their recipe—and this on [sic] turned out to be almost better.”
While it’s true that Elizabeth made currant bread, the recipe in Beard on Bread is based on a Pillsbury one for white bread enriched with powdered milk. James enhanced it with a swirl of raisin filling (golden sultanas plumped with sherry or Cognac—the booze was a late-draft enhancement—with mace and orange zest to stand in for candied citron). Though the reader might believe it was a recipe straight from Elizabeth’s handwritten recipe book, in fact it was only a simulation of a bread James remembered from Salmon Street.
James cited his sources for some recipes: the flatbread factory in Hamar, Elizabeth Ovenstad, and the Norwegian Government School for Domestic Science Teachers; also Clay Triplette (corn sticks), Helen Evans Brown (Corn Chili Bread), Carl Gohs (potato and zucchini breads), his old friend Alvin Kerr (Zephyr Rolls), and Myrtle Allen, owner of the Ballymaloe Inn of East Cork, Ireland (although Allen’s brown bread recipe is from a 1944 book James doesn’t cite, Doris Grant’s Your Daily Bread).
James aimed one of Beard on Bread’s most egregious slights at Craig Claiborne, with whom James was cordial in public, though privately they hated each other. “This . . . appeared in the columns of the New York Times several years ago,” James wrote in the headnote to Sourdough Rye, without mentioning that Claiborne introduced it; likewise Finnish Sour Rye. Both appeared in a 1968 Times feature. Claiborne was nearly as guilty as James in failing to acknowledge his sources, writing that “generous readers” (whom he didn’t name) had contributed the recipes.
Judith prodded James to add at least a vague note about the sourdough rye’s source. “JB,” she wrote in her editor’s pencil, “will you give credit to Times?” In a way, though, attribution didn’t matter.
Ever since Hors D’Oeuvre and Canapés—his first book—curation was James’s mode of authorship. His great talent was his knack for making a widely scattered collection of recipes seem authentically his. James’s work made up a canon of American food, almost as though it were crowd sourced. Erasing the authorship of others fit two of James’s mythologies. One was personal. It had to do with James’s encyclopedic knowledge and experience of food—for James to cite all of his sources would have challenged the narrative of his vastness.
The other was cultural: his conviction that building an American cuisine was a collective effort, a group project of readers who mailed recipes to the New York Times, women and men who entered Pillsbury Bake-Offs, and home cooks like Emil Kashouty, a Lebanese American who’d moved to New York City to find enough breathing space to live a cautiously queer life in private. James’s plagiarism was inexcusable. It also gave James’s books a Whitmanic quality, a democratic eclecticism, and a sweeping sense of the American character.
In James’s lifetime, by far the most popular American cookbooks were compendiums such as Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book and Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, the work of teams of uncredited recipe developers, writers, and editors. James did something similar, in a way, only under his own name and mythic persona. James’s fans were certain he embodied the nation’s food life. To James, that seemed like reason enough to commandeer a few recipes. And if it involved a little lying, either actively or by omission, well: James’s life always had been a continuous performance of concealment and dissembling.
: : :
ON A SPRING DAY IN 1971, a letter arrived at the office of Reed College’s alumni bulletin. It was from Ellen Mandleberg, an enterprising publicity agent at Atheneum Books in New York. Atheneum was about to publish a new book by James, “with the assistance,” according to the title page (though the cover showed James’s name alone), of Gino P. Cofacci. It was a small book without recipes, directed at Americans crowding onto budget flights to Europe—a glossary, basically, of dishes appearing on menus in France and Italy, with a guide to wine. Atheneum hoped that sales at airport bookshops and newsstands would be brisk.
Mandleberg had been reading James Beard’s author questionnaire (used internally for marketing purposes), in which James mentioned he’d gone to Reed. Mandleberg wrote to the alumni bulletin’s editor:
World-renowned culinary authority James Beard, who is an alumnus of Reed College, has written a new book, HOW TO EAT (AND DRINK) YOUR WAY THROUGH A FRENCH (OR ITALIAN) MENU, which Atheneum is publishing on June 21. Since Mr. Beard is a Reed alumnus, we think you will be interested in seeing his new book. Unfortunately Mr. Beard has not indicated the year he was awarded his B.A. from Reed, but we imagine it was sometime around 1924.
The letter caused a stir. James Beard, a Reedie! Why had no one at the college ever talked about it? Alarms went off in the fundraising office: One of the leading food personalities in America—willing, presumably, to lend his valuable name to benefits, if not make a donation of his own—was one of theirs! Over forty-some years, in countless interviews, James had never mentioned Reed; didn’t mention it in Delights and Prejudices or in any of his autobiographical notes for his syndicated newspaper column or magazine pieces. This was huge news.
Someone looked up James’s official record and reported it to Florence Lehman, the alumni director, who was also in charge of fundraising. “James Andrew [sic] x 24,” the note to Lehman read. ‘Wash. H.S. Dropped in Jan. for deficiency in scholarship.” Lehman called him in New York; she spoke with Emily Gilder, James’s secretary. Lehman noted his address, how he talked with his old friend Mary Hamblet every Sunday afternoon, and was very busy; how he had suffered a heart attack recently but hadn’t slowed his schedule.
After word got out, James received a few letters from old classmates. In April 1972, one Reed alum who wrote him, Gladys Chambers, reported back to Lehman on what James had told her of his months at Reed: how he lived in House I, a farmhouse across Woodstock Road, in a single room; how his close hallmates in the house were Herman Kenin, Max Gordon, and “Mr. Bechtold of the faculty.”
In 1973, the Oregon Historical Society discovered James. Its director, Thomas Vaughan, asked James to write the foreword to a reprint of The Web-Foot Cook Book by the women of the San Grael Society of Portland’s First Presbyterian Church, originally published in 1885. Through Vaughan, James met Morris Galen, a Portland attorney who also happened to be a member of Reed’s board of trustees. They met in Gearhart—actually in Surf Pines, the development just north of it, where James was renting a house. Galen (Morrie) and his wife, Evelyn, owned a weekend house there. James connected with them and hired Morrie as his personal attorney. In a way, it was as if Reed at its highest tier—the board of trustees—was taking James back, forgiving him his great shame.
Though he’d been a student there less than six months, James had always felt that Reed fit him—its democratic ideals and scorn for chichi; the grandeur of its solitary spruces and the introspection inspired by its greenness and distance from the city. Decades before, scandal and fear had caused his exile; Reed had seemed blocked to him forever. How he would dream that he walked its pathways and entered through the pointed Gothic doorway of the chapel. He had always loved Reed, had always been devoted to it in his heart, maybe even his soul, though James didn’t believe in the existence of souls. Reed was his first escape from home, the place where he’d pushed aside the paralyzing weight of his family and found a freedom and agility he’d only ever known at the beach.
In 1974, James surprised organizers by replying yes to the invitation for the class of 1924 reunion party. Maybe it was time to put his shame to rest. What had he been guilty of, really? He was the victim of politics, nothing more. Carl Jerome was a daily example of what a life of no shame looked like. In Miami the previous year, at the end of a long day, he had asked Carl where he was going. A gay bar, Carl said, and James asked if he could go along—he, James, for whom the gay bar had long been a place of potential calamity, of raids and exposure: a place to avoid. That night, he got up the will to overcome.
The place was empty (it was early). They sat at the bar, drinking beer from bottles. The two bartenders kept glancing over and murmuring.
The one who’d served them approached again. “Aren’t you James Beard?”
Cautiously, James answered that he was.
“Cool,” the bartender said. “Uh . . . do you want a glass for your beer?”
James kept swigging from the bottle.
: : :
THOUGH JAMES STILL ADORED IT, the West Tenth Street house was now too small. Every weekday it filled up with people: Clay and Carl; his secretary Emily Gilder and Betty Ward, who managed his travel and demonstration schedule. Plus so many who dropped by: Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, John Clancy, and Barbara Kafka; Helen McCully and Cecily Brownstone; not to mention anyone he knew visiting from the West Coast or Dallas or any one of a dozen places. There were young men like Carl who’d write or call cold, asking for advice about professional culinary schools or about getting a job in cooking. James might tell them to come by and they’d talk, if he got a hunch about them. Journalists lobbied to schedule time for profile interviews.
The ringing phone cut through every conversation. One or more typewriters clacked and dinged from morning to early evening. James had taken to doing all his writing by talking into his Sony tape recorder, often at five in the morning on Sundays, when there was enough of a lull in the life of the house to give him time to think.
And then, of course, there was Gino. Since leaving architecture, his bent for precision, his patience, and his need for order and controllable processes had led him to baking. He declared himself a pastry chef. He’d perfected the dacquoise, a delicate layer cake with (in Gino’s version) crisp layers of hazelnut meringue and a coffee crème au beurre, a meringue buttercream. He cut out a precisely shaped stencil for decorating the top with powdered sugar in an architectural design.
James had been making dacquoises since the 1950s; in 1959, his friend and protégé, John Clancy, who’d just launched a small catering business in New York, sold them (along with cassoulet) for holiday parties.
Gino had perfected his dacquoise for James’s dinner parties, which he, Gino, usually did not attend. Eventually, James persuaded a couple of restaurateur friends in the Village—Leon Lianides of the Coach House, Alfredo Viazzi of Alfredo’s Trattoria—to add Gino’s dacquoise to their menus. (Nobody found it easy to say no to James Beard.) Gino also made a rich, almost flourless chocolate cake for his pair of wholesale customers. He made no more than a few per week. To meet his self-imposed high standards, each cake took time.
Gino was finding new confidence in pastry, and it spilled over into how he felt about himself. His face had aged into rugged voluptuousness. His lips seemed fuller, his dimpled chin fleshier. He was nearing sixty and felt handsome still, though he fretted over his creeping baldness. Eventually, James assented to Gino’s follicular unit grafts (they had a joint checking account, so it wasn’t as though Gino needed a bag of cash to move ahead), plugs that created a new, lower hairline, drawn as meticulously across his forehead as Gino wanted. It boosted his confidence even more. He wanted to stay presentable for James, and for other men. In the crevices of James’s hectic life, early in the morning, before the first phone call to Cecily or Tom Margittai, they had an intimacy no one but Clay could witness.
They’d stopped being physical, at least in a sexual way. Still, Gino tended to James’s body. He helped him dress and undress, wrap and unwrap his legs, pull up and peel off his compression stockings: to express his devotedness to James’s body, the abiding joy of having found each other in middle age, two men no one else had wanted, who understood loneliness and depression. They’d long ago stopped being exclusive with each other. James’s need for intimate endorsement was too strong, and Gino had spent so much time away from James, during James’s long and frequent stays abroad. Things were different now. Gino felt desirable again, and his dacquoises convinced him he was finally doing vital work. So many of the people James would have tramping through the house would not—could not—understand that. Gino needed space, order, and quiet to do his work.
Gino wanted a new house, one with a larger apartment for himself, and his very own kitchen for baking and assembling cakes. It was essential that they move.
: : :
THE BRICK FAÇADE OF 167 West Twelfth Street had been tweaked so much over the decades that it appeared quasi-institutional: a grand first story of large multipaned windows with two stories of insignificant brick townhouse above. James and Gino’s block of West Tenth was smaller scale, more truly villagelike, despite the proximity of Sixth Avenue and the grime-and-disinfectant aura of the women’s prison. The western nub of West Twelfth was treeless and exposed, somehow vulnerable to the traffic strafing Seventh Avenue.
It had been an apartment building for some years when James bought it in 1973, though from 1922 to 1945 the street floors held the offices of the Co-Operative League of America, a progressive organization that provided education about worker co-ops and the dangers of predator capitalism. In fact, the league’s founders had had the entrance floor redone in 1922 in Colonial Revival style—hence the Mount Vernon lower windows, the porte cochere–scale lantern above the front door. In a way, it was perfect for James’s vanity. As America was gearing up for its bicentennial year (1976), James was the George Washington of the soufflé and the chicken casserole.
The third floor had a large enough apartment for Gino; they could rent out the fourth-floor apartment. James would have his teaching kitchen on the half-subterranean ground floor, between the small dining room in front and the large backyard. The second floor would have the living room and the cookbook library, with James’s office against the back wall, above the garden, and his bed would be in a little alcove overlooking the street, above the front door. The tight-switchback staircase was nearly impossible for James to navigate. At least Gino was happy. In the spring of 1974, they officially christened the place, but it needed decorating help, something to give it Jamesian style and scale.
Somewhere at the end of 1975, a man who’d been in James’s Seaside cooking classes rang up. Jerry Lamb—a friend of Mary Hamblet—was sweet, funny, and queer. He had a busy interior design business in Portland, with clients in Manhattan and Washington, DC. Lamb said, “I’m here in New York.” James told him to stop by for dinner.
Lamb grabbed a cab and went down to the house. They had dinner. Over a glass or two in the library, James said, “If I turned you loose, what would you do with this house?”
Lamb spun a few ideas. James told him to have at it.
He reupholstered the furniture, brought in fabrics, chose wallpapers from James’s large collection. For the library walls, James asked for Chinese red; Lamb custom-mixed a darkish tomato soup color. The kitchen crouched in a dark, airless corner. To liven it up, Lamb proposed the world-map wallpaper he had used for his own bathroom in Portland—to underscore James’s status as a man of the world, he said. James yielded.
Lamb lined the walls and ceiling of James’s bed alcove with mirrors. James was moving ever more slowly by then; sometimes he liked to lie in bed when there were guests, and he could see them reflected in the living room as they talked. Lamb mirrored every surface in the bathroom. He designed Gino’s minimalist apartment, including his private pastry kitchen with cupboards of dark walnut and Italian wall tiles glazed with a watercolor effect in umber and cream.
Eventually they expanded the house. Gino drew up plans to smash through the house’s rear wall and glass in part of the backyard to form a conservatory dining room, twenty-five feet square and twenty-five feet high. Gino designed a steel staircase and had it fabricated—no more squeezing up and down the tortuous front stairs. James also needed a roomier bath. Lamb suggested siting it on the eight-foot-wide balcony above the greenhouse, open to the sky and the wash of light from the backyard. The nozzles were behind a folding screen, so James could have privacy.
When the greenhouse became the dining room, the office moved to the front of the house, off the kitchen. James had a contemporary Knoll table with a black marble top; McGuire chairs of heavy rattan with rawhide bindings. He designed a huge sideboard with racks for displaying James’s majolica, which spread beyond it onto the walls and the surface of every credenza and side table. It was a beautiful mausoleum.
Lying in bed in his mirrored alcove after everyone had gone, the telephone next to him having ceased ringing for the day, James had time and space to think. He could see his chest with its scars from a quarter century of hospital procedures and take comfort: Someday, maybe soon, everything would be gone. That included everything he’d ever collected, the antiques and mementos. They’d be sold, or carried off surreptitiously by the hangers-on, anyone desperate enough for grifted glory. It would be the final delicious absurdity—only Helen Evans Brown, his past and forever kindred outsider in the world of food, would have truly appreciated it.
One evening in November 1981, James Villas, the food and wine editor for Town & Country, stopped by 167 West Twelfth to accompany James to dinner. James had phoned him earlier: “Kiddo,” he said, “what are you up to?” Villas was queer. Even at forty-three, he possessed perennial golden-boy handsomeness, a North Carolina soft drawl, English tailoring, and country-club social ease. He and James talked opera, food of course, and gossip. James adored giving him hugs. Sometimes Villas accompanied James and Gino to the Coach House. They’d sit at adjacent tables, James and Gino facing each other at one, Villas at the other. Gino would sit silent while James and Villas spoke of Wagner and country hams.
On that November night, James and Villas dined à deux on the Upper East Side at the Post House, a new steakhouse with a manly roughrider edge. James drank his usual (Glenlivet; his celebrity doctor, Denny Cox, had forbidden him wine) and they ate what seemed like the entire menu: a veal chop sweating abundant pinkish juice and black-crust rib steak, rare inside, along with hash browns, creamed spinach, and onion rings; crab cakes and steamed lobsters; black and white chocolate mousses and a lemon tart. After dinner, James, somewhat tipsy, sang a few lines of Tristan at the table. Earlier, Villas had told him about Rounds, a hot new gay club on Fifty-Third Street, instantly notorious for the model looks of its high-class hustlers, where Tennessee Williams and closeted Wall Street executives—the descendants of Jim Cullum—entertained with iced bottles of vodka and Champagne.
“Kiddo,” James said, as they rose to leave and the maître d’ sent someone scurrying for their coats, “what about that place with those boys? Any chance we can stop by there?” They kept their hired driver waiting outside Rounds while, inside, they were led to a banquette. James ordered Scotch—in their tailored jackets, he and Villas looked flush with cash. A pair of handsome working boys sat down on either side of James. He bought them drinks. Villas asked whether they’d ever heard of James Beard and they shrugged and shook their heads. James bought more drinks.
When Richard Sax, the thirty-two-year-old food editor of Food & Wine magazine, walked into Rounds that night, he spotted Villas with the Dean of American Cookery, holding court on a banquette, flanked by hustlers. Sax approached, dropped to one knee, and, in a gesture of hammy obeisance, leaned over to kiss James’s cocktail ring, as though he’d been granted an audience with the pope.
Sax said, “Jim, are you aware that back there on that banquette is Vladimir Horowitz?”
Villas inched his way to the rear of the club, returned, and reported it was true; the great Horowitz was likewise surrounded by pretty young men. James howled. So much of the public face of American culture, the books and records and TV programs that moved the nation’s housewives, salesmen, secretaries, and bank-branch executives was shaped by those compelled to live behind walls, nursing half-open secrets. Survival depended on the willingness of everybody else to keep silence. There were things that nobody who lived outside the walls ever needed to know.
Barbara Kafka had come close to breaching James’s wall in 1978, when she got him to say into her tape recorder—for a series of interviews on which she hoped to base a book of memoirs—that it was time to come clean about being gay. (Barbara, whom James mentored as he would a daughter, had a knack for making him open up.) But he’d made no promise to let her publish a transcript of the recording—at least while he was alive.
For years, Judith Jones had been urging James to write a second volume of his memoirs, to pick up in the mid-1960s, where Delights and Prejudices ended. She’d call it Menus and Memories. From time to time, Judith would send a writer she liked—Mary Goodbody and Irene Sax—to see whether they could get James to open up about the past, but those efforts went nowhere.
James’s sexuality was never part of the memoir Judith had in mind. At Knopf, James’s reputation with conservative, churchgoing cookbook buyers in Des Moines would be safe. Judith saw James’s value as a repository of cooking knowledge, a great teacher able to calm the apprehensive masses in their kitchens. His future books for Knopf would mostly be a repackaging of existing recipes and essays. His syndicated newspaper columns became 1974’s Beard on Food; his Gourmet stories bloomed again as 1977’s James Beard’s Theory and Practice of Good Cooking. For the latter, James hired Nick Malgieri, a twenty-seven-year-old pastry chef who’d worked in France with Richard Olney, to go through stacks of old Gourmet magazines, tear out every article James had ever written, and paste them into a binder. The only original thing in Theory and Practice was an appendix—the Concordance, a detailed ingredient glossary.
How better to peddle James to the churchgoing women of America than with the ecclesiastical word Concordance?
: : :
ON MAY 16, 1976, James received a kind of closure from the institution that in so many ways had shaped his life. Morrie Galen, his attorney and a member of Reed College’s board of trustees, had put James’s name into the college’s candidate pool for honorary degrees. And so, on a cool, overcast Sunday, on the lawn facing Eliot Hall, James, dressed in an enormous black doctoral gown and square academic cap, stood and wept as President Paul Bragdon conferred on him a Doctor of Humane Letters degree. (I. F. Stone, the progressive journalist and author, received an honorary degree that day along with James.)
In his remarks, Bragdon hailed James as a person “whose impact on society can truly be said to have been a force for the improvement of the quality of human life.” Bragdon lauded American Cookery as more than a collection of recipes, but rather “the definitive work on the evolution of American food.” And though he got the title wrong—he called it Delights and Pleasures—Bragdon cited Delights and Prejudices as a book that, in its evocation of a golden age of Portland food, “might well serve as an inspiration and model for the rehabilitation of the city’s restaurants and markets.”
Three weeks later, back in San Francisco, in his suite at the Stanford Court, James suffered a serious heart attack. He lay in a bed at Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center in Pacific Heights, his well-scarred chest planted with electrodes, his loose, slack-skinned body existing precariously under a lattice of wires. His weight had tipped above three hundred pounds; his doctor had put him on an apocalyptic diet of six hundred salt-free calories a day. Marion Cunningham left his side only when she had to, when visiting hours were over.
Carl showed up at the hospital to tell James he was resigning as director of the James Beard Cooking School. He was clearing out, flying to London to be with a man he’d met the previous spring. It was during a stopover, en route with James to Venice for a teaching stint at the Gritti Palace Hotel. That night, Carl had slipped out of the hotel to unwind at a gay bar; he hooked up with someone. They’d secretly kept in touch.
To James, Carl’s announcement felt like two knives to the chest: losing his assistant at his moment of greatest physical and emotional need and losing Carl to another man.
But what could Carl do? In four years, James’s control over him had never relaxed—Carl was desperate to flee. Hadn’t he endured everything, knowing that a moment like this was inevitable? Being on call twenty-four hours a day, shouldering the twin demands of travel and public appearances with a man whose body was failing. And then there was the constant weight of James’s need, expressed as lust (though in truth it was psychosexual), beamed across an unbridgeable gulf. This was the moment Carl had waited for—his opening to escape. He hoped to leverage all he’d learned to start his own career as an author and a teacher, speaking in his own voice.
It crushed James.
“Go have a good life,” he told Carl with bitterness. It was the end.
Not really, though. Weeks later, James and Carl began a correspondence across the Atlantic, via messages spoken onto a single cassette tape that each would record over and return. They shared observations on food and daily life in London and New York, nothing deep. James didn’t want paper letters, nothing that could be stuffed into a drawer and discovered later. In Seaside, James would talk to Carl on a pay phone, secretly, to avoid the disapproval of friends.
James had come close to dying in San Francisco. After that, Morrie Galen advised him to write his will—especially since James had no obvious heirs, and his book rights and royalties, spread across decades and several handshake agreements, were complicated.
When it came time to draw up the will, James seemed to draw a blank. He knew he wanted Gino to keep his apartment on the third floor, for as long as Gino lived. And he’d need a monthly cash stipend. Clay should get some cash. Apart from that, James wanted everything to go: the house to be sold (with the stipulation that Gino would stay), James’s things to be auctioned off. He’d already sent his papers to the University of Wyoming. (The American Heritage Center there had hoped to establish a major US culinary archive, though after the effort failed, James’s papers would be returned east, to New York University.)
Morrie told him he would have to decide who would inherit the money after everything was sold; who would inherit the rights to the books, and receive royalties after Gino’s death.
James couldn’t say. He’d always lived in the present, never thought far into the future. Thinking about his will was no different. Should he leave his estate to a charity or a nonprofit? Which one?
Well, Morrie said, of course there was always Reed College. James could certainly name his alma mater as beneficiary. James shrugged. He agreed.
In August 1976, Morrie arrived in New York with the completed will. James signed it, witnessed by his secretary, Emily Gilder, and her husband, and Morrie filed it. Just like that, the institution that had been a prime architect of shame and fear for James was in line to become the ultimate guardian of all he’d achieved. In a twist of harsh and delicious irony, Reed would become heirs of a food career James stumbled onto after failing at everything else, following the forced expulsion that bled his confidence.
“I don’t want a monument when I die,” he told Jerry Lamb one day, as they sat in the greenhouse on West Twelfth Street, gazing toward the birch trees and the fountain and the large stone sculpture of James’s head, floating above the bluestone terrace. He didn’t want a tomb or a plaque or a memorial. He wanted his ashes scattered in the surf off Gearhart Beach, to become part of the sand tumbling ashore, like the delicate green and blue glass floats he conjured at the end of Delights and Prejudices. They were designed to keep fishing nets aloft in the water, but some always broke loose. They rode the currents for nearly five thousand miles, so far from their original purpose that when they got to Oregon, it seemed they only ever existed to bob free.