On the plane back to San Francisco I had a premonition that I would never see Jim again. I had thought I had found safe home ground in the Bay Area by opening Stars, but Jim had said I had enemies, and not ones I could keep close. And I always listened to what Jim had to say. I liked my enemies out in front—this one was obviously more of a terrorist hiding in the gloom.
What I thought of Jim was best summed up by one of Australia’s greatest impresarios. Leo Schofield was a critic and food writer for the Sydney Morning Herald. A year later his article “California Cuisine” in Australian Gourmet Traveller, a magazine I read religiously, said Beard was the person who “liberated American cooking from Gallic shackles.” He mentioned chefs whom Beard had influenced, among them Wolfgang Puck (“combining European traditions with chutzpah,” photographed in Spago drinking champagne with Stevie Wonder), Bradley Ogden (“the wunderkind from San Francisco, via Traverse City, Michigan”), and me. Puck told Leo that Beard was more important than the New York Times’ French classicist Craig Claiborne, “who thought one had to go to France for ideas.” Schofield mentioned that my link with Beard was particularly strong because of my love of nineteenth-century regional American cooking. When I told Leo my favorite story of a nineteenth-century Cape Cod picnic ending with sun-ripened cantaloupe melons filled with hundred-year-old Madeira that had been chilled the day before down a well, Leo pronounced that I “combined a romantic streak with extraordinary practicality.”
I told him he had it the wrong way around, for me and for Beard, that American cuisine, like Australian, was all about straightforwardness of personality and that attraction for the slim chance. “Americans have never been ones to hold back. They go at something, and if that’s lemongrass in a sauce, the next thing you have everywhere is Lemon Grass Beurre Blanc. It may not work, but at least they will have a go.”
Sometimes this American quality was lauded. In me it was increasingly seen as the “arrogance” of a “megastar.”
“ONE LITIGIOUS BITCH”
The king was dead, but dreams needed to go forward.
When asked by a reporter in early 1985 about my future plans, I said the first thing I would do was raise my salary. My disputes with my partner in Stars had turned into a full-scale war of litigation, and my salary was frozen. I was still paying myself fifteen thousand dollars less a year than my chef. But my ambition was to retire as soon as possible with as much money as possible. And that had been my thought from the day I started. Then I could open a restaurant in Monte Carlo like the one half in and half out of the water I had designed for my Harvard School of Design thesis.
Before we opened Stars, Doyle and I had agreed that if the partnership was not working, we would just have to say so and one of us would buy the other out. He delayed and delayed signing the buyout contract. But we had an eye-to-eye handshake. By the piano one afternoon thirty-six days after we opened Stars, my throat, guts, and heart in a tangled mess, I sat down with Doyle and his wife for that chat and our promise to part amicably.
“Tough,” was Doyle’s reply. The two of them smirked at my astonishment while the bartenders leaned over to hear why I was so alternately red and white in the face.
Our differences were no secret. The previous night Doyle and his wife had come in at prime time to a packed Stars. He complained to me that he had been waiting for two hours for a table. “Let them [the walk-ins] wait” (rather than “let them eat cake,” I guess). I knew then that we were truly different animals: I could no more have commandeered a table that night in my own restaurant than have told the cooks to burn the food. Owning a restaurant meant one thing to me, another to him. The next morning I looked at my Gault Millau travel guide filled with photos of the Côte d’Azur and wrote in my daily notebook: “Plan the way out, a coup, or just sell out.”
The following night Doyle pulled his own coup.
It was a Sunday evening, and the only reason he was in town on a weekend was for the first benefit we were holding, for AIDS research, one of the first in the United States at which world-famous stars and socialites thought it safe to be seen in public for such a then socially unacceptable cause. Terry McEwen, director of the opera and a grand queen of great style, had the idea of bringing the world’s top musicians and singers to the San Francisco Opera, with our very chic mutual friend and mentor Denise Hale ensuring the social turnout and its press. The musical evening brought tears to all but the most hard-bitten, and the after-performance party across the road at Stars was both triumphant and socially safe. Suddenly raising money for AIDS at social gatherings was fun—and acceptable. The only fly in the ointment was my partner.
The mayor and guests were surprised to see Doyle in his Napa farming clothes for a black-tie affair. None of the staff were surprised to see him sitting at the bar downing drinks. I could see that Apache chip on his shoulder slowly growing back into a tree as the more and more famous and bijou-bedecked socialites assembled around the bar before dinner. It did not sit well with Doyle that we were giving away the evening, “losing” probably fourteen thousand dollars in gross sales. It never occurred to him that the staff were donating their time and that the food and wine had been donated as well. The next day our headwaiter, Rick, who was gay, was incensed when he described Doyle’s reaction to the event and his comment to him.
“IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU FAGGOTS”
As I remember, and according to Stars’ headwaiter Rick, Doyle said something like, “If it weren’t for you faggots, we would not have to do things like this.” That was shocking enough for Rick, but the fact that the comment could easily have been heard by the opera director (gay), the mayor (straight), and a major opera star (gay), all standing within earshot, was even more damaging. Rick said that since Herb Caen, San Francisco’s gossip columnist, hadn’t heard Doyle, he told him.
The next day Herb called to ask what I was going to do before, the implication was, he told the entire city. Two days later the story was out, on the San Francisco Chronicle’s most-read page. The staff, outraged, assembled in the alley outside the restaurant after calling me at the Santa Fe. They would return if I insisted, but they wanted my assurance that I’d do something, and fast, about my partner.
I drove into the alley at Stars and persuaded the staff to go back to work. I asked the managers if they wanted to work for Doyle. The answer was a resounding “No!” It was obvious that he should now manage the Santa Fe and I, Stars, so I posted an announcement that I’d be taking over 100 percent of the operations, and that Doyle and his wife would no longer be coming into the restaurant except as equal owners, with all those carefully defined privileges. Within the hour, the staff of the day at the Santa Fe showed up at Stars. I sent them back, and then several of San Francisco’s most expensive lawyers began working overtime.
A superbly ruthless attorney understood my predicament.
“You want me to put his neck in the gutter and stamp on it.”
With his help I kept my partner and his wife out of Stars long enough to calm the restaurant down. But I knew that the trouble was just starting. I had Stars to myself now, and decided to go for the big deal. Fight for it. But there was still the Santa Fe Bar & Grill.
On New Year’s Eve 1985 I was supervising dinner at both Stars and the Santa Fe—alternating one hour at each. Hurtling back and forth over the Bay Bridge without a driver on New Year’s Eve, I wondered if my divided loyalties and responsibilities would get me killed. On top of that, Santa Fe was in chaos under Doyle’s control. He had promoted a mediocre waiter to manager, where he was even less competent, and when I arrived at 6 P.M. on the biggest night of the year, he was having a leisurely dinner in the office. The staff looked lost, and Doyle was nowhere to be found. No one knew if he’d show up at all.
When my attorneys filed a suit to appoint a receiver for the Santa Fe, Doyle countersued. When asked by a reporter for his take on all this, Doyle said, “The restaurant business is intense and complicated and often inspires disputes.” I laughed when I read that, since if Doyle had known as much about the restaurant business as he did about intensity and disputes, we wouldn’t have had a problem. I publicly shrugged off the countersuit: “I don’t own anything personal in California except a cat, some clothes, and a lot of cookbooks.” And I made sure of that the next day.
But I was worried. This was much more dangerous than Alice standing on the steps of her house and screaming, “It’s my house, my car, and my restaurant!” A lot more than the tensions inside her Panisse kitchen as described by one of the staff: “We were told that we were a family, but it was more like we were the ugly stepsisters and Alice was Cinderella.” More than Jonathan Waxman saying you could never really know fear until you’d heard Alice’s footfalls on the stairs. This was Doyle’s last stand, and he had a pit bull lawyer.
After too much money spent and time wasted, we agreed finally that the Moons would run the Santa Fe and I would run Stars. It was a big “Duh” for me, but that created a management vacuum at the Santa Fe. After a kitchen fire that was the direct result (or so one of the kitchen staff told me) of no one having set maintenance schedules, Doyle alleged to me that the staff had left the flues dirty to make him look bad. Feeling he was sociopathically paranoid, I suggested we sell the Santa Fe.
ONE PARTNERSHIP DOWN, ONE TO GO
In 1986 I listed Stars with Sotheby’s real estate. I knew no one would buy it without me or a noncompete clause, but if the opening bid of $5 million was met, so be it: the Côte d’Azur hadn’t gone anywhere. Of course no offers were made, the realtor telling us that without me, why would anyone buy it? Doyle and I entered the next phase, in which we could bid against each other for 100 percent of Stars.
We needed to be at the attorneys’ office first thing on a Monday morning with a down payment of $50,000 in cash. The remaining balance from a successful bid would be due in ninety days. I didn’t have anything more than a Mercedes payment to my name, so I had to go to the bank. As it happened, however, a manager, Steven Vranian (from our now-famous Newport lunch in 1983), had missed the three o’clock Friday bank closing, so I took the cash from the restaurant. I was later sued for fraud for that ingenuity, but it worked, even if all weekend I was terrified of the illegality. Fortunately, I had much to distract me that weekend, including a celebrity appearance at an Orange County March of Dimes gala and an article to finish for Vogue. On Sunday night I opened a magnum of vintage Krug and looked for a bad movie on TV to put me to sleep. The only option was Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and that seemed somehow quite fitting.
At 9 A.M. sharp on Monday we were in the attorneys’ office, ready for more drama than a high-stakes craps game in Vegas. As usual, Doyle was half an hour late. To save a few bucks, he’d searched for a parking space instead of putting his $60,000 car in the building’s garage. After the Moons arrived, it took six hours to set the rules. The bidding started at three thirty. The Moons’ attorney tossed the 1889 silver dollar, the wife called, and I won. My opening bid of $500,000. So nervous I forgot the agreed-upon floor and wrote $550,000. Doyle immediately topped it. The poker game had begun.
PHILIPPINES TO THE RESCUE
One had to have the money in hand. I didn’t. What I did have was a secret weapon. Tapping a San Francisco source would have given Doyle a shot at finding out how much I had to spend, so I’d gone to my international contacts again. Sitting in the foyer was a man whom I had not introduced. But he could never have been mistaken for poor. Benjamin Bitanga, a friend from the Philippines, and I had an understanding. He would guarantee me up to $1,250,000, over which I promised not to bid.
As the bidding reached $1,000,000, rivulets of sweat rolled down under my shirt. I could not remember how to write the numbers that add $50,000 to a million, and after almost bidding $1,500,000, I pulled the note back and told my lawyer, “Here, you write it, you know what I mean.”
What was the restaurant worth? While there are mathematical formulas for working this out, the spread of multipliers is so great, the variables so numerous, and the psychological and emotional forces so powerful, that establishing the monetary value is more art than recognizable science. Commonly understood practice is to multiply the annual net by a number ranging from three to eight, depending on the intrinsic values of the lease, the location, the staff performance, and the goodwill of things like the central figure staying on or not, or anything else that will affect the future viability or earnings. So to Doyle the restaurant was worth a good deal less than it was to me. If he bought Stars, it would be without me, goodwill, or the top staff. But this was poker. Bluffing would get me to pay him more than I wanted to spend.
When the bidding hit $1,250,000, Doyle, his wife, and attorney left the room. Because I was used to his tactics, his rigor mortis smile meant nothing to me. The sweat pushing out from the armpits of his Hugo Boss suit did. I had him, but I was at my ceiling, so he had me, too. He returned with another $50,000 deposit, which I topped with money I didn’t have to reach $1,350,000.
Doyle shot out of his chair and said to his lawyer, “Let’s take a walk”—which I took to mean they were walking away from the game. Lose his fifty grand to me.
Champagne bubbles floated in front of my eyes. I called the restaurant and told them to put the cases I had in my car (in the event I lost) on ice, and to serve them to the hundred or so regulars in Stars waiting for the outcome.
“You have not bought anything yet,” my Asian friend said coolly.
He was right. I called back to tell the restaurant to put the champagne on hold, but I knew from the uproar on the other end of the phone that I was too late. The chefs had had their resumes ready in case of my defeat; now they were ceremonially tearing them up. I told my attorney that if the Moons returned with another bid, I’d have a choice between slitting my wrists and jumping out the office’s thirtieth-floor window. Doyle came into the room and spoke.
“YOUR ACES BEAT MY KINGS”
Doyle looked pointedly at my ace Filipino friend. I called the restaurant and confirmed the outcome of the shoot-out. When I returned to Stars, I saw that the evening’s menu bore the inscription “All Our Love and Support.” I was going to need it.
The opposing attorney later said that Doyle had been “very much a buyer.” I wondered where he’d gotten the money—if he had it at all. We later heard an eerie rumor that it was Bill Kimpton and his group. In any case, it was by no means clear who the “winner” had been. The Moons had put only their initial $57,000 into Stars. I thought their getting $1.3 million would satisfy their appetites (2,300 percent annual return should satisfy anyone) and whatever sense of honor they had. But how hurt was their pride? With my first partner I had ignored the power of a woman scorned. Now I had denied the power of a dishonored Apache.