HOW I BECAME HENRI SOULÉ’S DARLING
AFTER A TIME, IT BECAME CLEAR THAT I WAS AVOIDING CARNAL KNOWLEDGE of Craig’s favorite, Le Pavillon, creation of the quintessential Henri Soulé. I just didn’t have the courage to walk up unknown and unrecommended to the legendary martinet at his podium as he rationed out the royal banquettes at Le Pavillon. I knew from reading Women’s Wear Daily and Wechsberg’s Dining at the Pavillon how his glance could turn a poseur to fleur de sel. And the two of us—thanks to Don’s boyish look and my bargain-basement Ohrbach’s couture—were clearly not to the Pavillon born, unlike Jack Kennedy (who got his milk served in an ice bucket). I did not want to be hustled off to the dark nethers of Soulé’s Siberia and be fed last week’s lamb chops. It would have helped if we could have been introduced by a regular, someone to vouch for us in our untitled, un-best-dressed, un-Dun & Bradstreet shabbiness. But there was no one.
Finally, I realized the way to reach Monsieur Soulé was through my typewriter. I had started freelancing so that our fancy eating would be tax-deductible. I proposed a story to Ladies’ Home Journal: “A Week in the Kitchen of the Pavillon.” Henri Soulé, a flirtatious five-foot-five cube of amiability, was willing. Pouting and posing, an owl who saw himself as an osprey, he instructed his chef, Clément Grangier, to suffer me in the kitchen below for as long as required. I arrived each morning in my tennis shoes, was taught how to flute a mushroom, watched chef Grangier whisk butter to order for a fussy habitué, marveled at the saucier’s iron right forearm, and took lessons in quenelles de brochet—the delicate whipped pike and cream dumplings that were my favorite dish.
One Friday, Soulé invited me to lunch with him at 3:00 PM. “Say you want les tripes à la mode de Caen,” he commanded. “It’s forbidden by my doctor. That damn Grangier won’t even serve it to me.” He instructed chef Grangier to hand-chop his usual hamburger. When our food had been dished up from the copper casseroles, and the captain and waiter had backed away in respectful obeisance, Soulé switched plates, generously alloting me a plop of tripe alongside my burger.
I stared at the tripe, a scary nest of anatomical parts in a muddy sauce. It would be a while before my aversion to tripe would evolve into a passion for tripe in all its guises. I didn’t have a lot of aversions in the dawn of my gourmand life, but enough that I felt I would have to conquer them. Beets made me gag. I didn’t eat olives. I hadn’t yet fallen in love with oysters. The worship of caviar escaped me. I had acquired an unDetroiterly passion for sweetbreads but had not mastered brains. I speared the tiniest nubbin of tripe on my fork, doused it heavily with sauce, and swallowed it whole. “Hmmm,” I said.
Soulé looked up, fork balanced en route to his mouth. “So you are writing about the secrets of Le Pavillon. You won’t find the secret of Le Pavillon in the kitchen,” he said. “The secret of Le Pavillon . . . c’est moi.” He puffed up his pouter-pigeon chest. “Le Pavillon, c’est moi.”
In May of 1965, Soulé announced he would reopen La Côte Basque, which he had sold in a fit of pique to a confrere who, alas, simply wasn’t making a go of it. There was talk of bankruptcy. To recover the unpaid debt, Soulé would have to repossess and run it himself. He had always thought of La Côte Basque as “Le Pavillon for the poor. A place for a man to bring his mistress while he comes with his wife to Le Pavillon.”
Don had left the Post by then and was happier than he had ever been, caught up in the excitement of the Herald Tribune, where he edited Jimmy Breslin and a young red-haired southern fellow named Tom Wolfe, whose prose had a way of ricocheting out of control. I’d quit the Post at Don’s urging to work full-time on a novel that grew so thorny and dense, I was finally forced to abandon it. I needed my freelancing for magazines more than ever to justify my existence and help finance our gourmandlich wanderings. Don encouraged me to offer the Soulé story to Clay Felker, an editor at New York, the Trib’s Sunday magazine. Clay, and Shelly Zelaznick, orchestrating amazing flights of unleashed journalism, had everyone talking. My docudrama of the countdown to the celebrity-riddled opening lunch was important; Soulé told me later, “The Ladies’ Home Journal is okay, but the Trib . . . that means something to Soulé. Now you must come often. You and your husband. This is your home.”
He lighted up a cigar. I lighted up a cigar. We puffed away.
About that cigar: After five sessions with the hypnotist, I had stopped smoking on New Year’s Eve. Ten days later, Don bought me an exquisite tortoiseshell and ivory cigarette holder he’d found in a small antiques shop. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I wanted desperately not to smoke again. “You didn’t notice I’m not smoking?” I asked.
“You can smoke little cigars,” Don suggested. “You don’t inhale cigars.” He had begun smoking long, thin cigars for the gestures, I thought, and the worldly ceremony. He brought home a small box of pencil-thin Schimmelpennicks, that just fit into the delicate holder.
When Soulé lighted a cigar after our next lunch, I pulled out my little box of small Dutch cigars, slipped one into the mother-of-pearl mouth of my holder, and let Soulé light it. He was delighted.
“I love a woman who smokes cigars,” he had said. He insisted I let him fill my purse with small Cuban cigars whenever I came to Le Pavillon. A small stockpile of these hoarded Cubanos found their way to Don’s humidor. I never really liked that awful cigar taste in my mouth. I gave them up after a few months because I didn’t want to smell like my uncle Max.
I loved those gossipy lunches, the unfolding intrigue of the food establishment, Monsieur Soulé’s indiscreet confessions. The lies certain people told to get a reservation when Soulé insisted he was booked. The cosmetic titan who would stop short and refuse to budge if Soulé tried to lead him to a table beyond a certain line in the carpet. The great beauty who had so much to say to her walker and nothing to say to her husband. That’s how it was in the fall of 1968, when Felker beckoned me to the new New York. I had one foot in my kitchen and a finger already in the Manhattan dining stew. So maybe Clay’s casting was prophetic. I might not know enough to criticize anyone’s rack of lamb or floating island in New York magazine, but I definitely had the requisite hunger.