The twentieth-century American novelist and historian Louis Auchincloss, America’s expert on its polite society and old money, said of Ruth Draper, “You can get away with absolutely anything, if you are a success.” So the carping of the right-wing press had no effect on my social local standing after I was seen with the blond Russian superstar on my arm. A lesson I had learned with Malcolm Forbes was that two celebrities are exponentially mightier than one. Surrounding myself with the famous was both armor against the media and oil for our business machine. “Tower promotes himself and his restaurants tirelessly,” said one article. “ ‘It is bone-crushingly exhausting,’ he admits, ‘but it certainly is much better for the business to be constantly in the public eye.’”
That was certainly true once Denise Hale adopted Stars as her venue.
For friends like Jim Beard, whom she once tried to hire as her private chef; for Italian friends like Gianfranco Ferré, French friends like Givenchy and Frédéric Chandon, Hollywood friends like Billy Wilder, Kirk Douglas, George Christy, Dominick Dunne, and the Reagans, and New York friends like Oscar de la Renta and the Kissingers, we were “it” at Stars. Everyone else came to watch. Denise’s list extended to the Gettys, Rex Harrison, David Brinkley, and the king of Spain. All feted at Stars. The laconically flamboyant Berkeley critic Charles Perry wrote that I was paying too much attention to fame and not enough to food: “It’s too bad that celebrities can’t be eaten, because the way many California restaurants are going these days, the promise of hobnobbing with the wealthy, famous, and powerful is almost as big a drawing card for them as their menus.” He had been to Spago as well.
Charles was early Berkeley, so David Webb paste or real diamonds around surgically enhanced necks would have been difficult for him to swallow. Especially since he couldn’t wear them. But he had a point. At a party for the U.S. ambassador to Mexico (the toweringly handsome John Gavin), such was the power of Denise that tout San Francisco came out on a rainy Sunday night when they would usually be home in their TSE cashmere sweats secretly watching Tales of the City. All the newspaper barons were there, the Hearsts and the Thieriots, Danielle Steel with a few million in Rajasthan jewels studded into her gold maternity jacket, corporate giants from Syntex, the incomparable helicopter-flying Al Wilsey, the gloriously beautiful and impeccably dressed Urannia Ristow, the Safeway Magowans, and the winery Jordans. It was heaven, gushed the gossip columnists, and the three hundred others who came to have dinner and watch agreed. All except Charles Perry. Stars was proof that if you open such a place, all the world will come to see each other. He would rather they came for the food. He reproached me with early days of Chez Panisse. He was reliving them. I was not.
Gerald Asher from Gourmet gave his view of my appetite for the press. “The press, especially the Eastern press, loved Alice—this little girl who’d started a terrific restaurant with no experience was a good story. Why should she argue? It would not have helped if she had been a shrinking violet. When she was cast as the Joan of Arc of California cuisine, Jeremiah probably felt like the Dauphin.”
Now I was ready to be king.
Constantly in society’s eye, chefs now moved from socially unpresentable to socially necessary. I had never been comfortable telling my old-school grandmother (with her staff of domestics) that I cooked professionally after all that money my grandparents spent sending me to Harvard college and graduate school. Now working in a restaurant kitchen became not only respectable (sort of) but glamorous. “Talking to Tower,” one reporter wrote, “you realize the days of the semi-literate hash slinger are over, and that the men in white hats are, well, white collar as well.” But when Time magazine said I was receiving “as much press as Meryl Streep,” damaging controversy started to rule as much as door-opening fame.
The end of the eighties saw the maturation of the chef as superstar, until it picked up again around 2000 with TV shows. But the first seeds of discontent were sown, and not just from Berkeley writers who had not been invited to sit with the likes of the king of Spain or America’s best-selling romance novelist. I had stopped reading about myself, but the regulars at Stars never resisted the latest silliness in the columns, like my “Ronald Colman” voice and “Ivy League” airs, or being called “the Cary Grant of the cuisine scene.”
NOUVELLE NAPOLEON
I particularly loved Focus magazine calling me a “nouvelle Napoleon spreading the revolution.” But most went beyond the food. When a paper as far away as the Maui News reported that I looked “like an Americanized Michael Caine, curly blond hair and skin flushed from the tropical heat,” it was obvious that more than food was involved. Which came first in this love affair, I wondered, and who will be blamed when it falters? One reporter talked of my “auburn” curls, another of my “blond” ones, and yet another of my “long English locks.” I vowed to get out of the business while I still had hair.
When the reporters got to my old friends, I knew it was time to reassess my love affair with the press. They found my Harvard roommate Michael Palmer in the late 1980s. “Were the stories of flying blancmanges true?” they asked.
“It never came to blows,” he said. “Jeremiah does have a temper and doesn’t hesitate to make demands. He does have a certain verbal outrageousness.”
Asked if success had tainted his old Harvard cooking buddy, Michael laughed. “No, he’s the same old perverse Jeremiah.”
Yes, I had done more than my share of wooing press attention, but even as I worried that my obsession would backfire on me, I found it impossible to resist saying yes to almost every promotional offer, whether national magazines or billboards as a Dewar’s poster boy.
The one erected outside Spago on Sunset Boulevard annoyed Wolfgang Puck with its huge caption “Jeremiah Tower: Chef to the Stars.” He said he was.
In 1988, USAir’s in-flight magazine exaggerated that I was “arguably America’s best-known chef-restaurateur.” What was more true was the statement that Stars (I would have included Spago) “has introduced diners to a new way to appreciate dining out.” In an article called “Drugless in L.A.,” the blowup quote beside a photo of Elizabeth Taylor said, “Most people would just as soon meet a chef like Jeremiah Tower as Warren Beatty.” The next day the story went around that I had been at the Betty Ford Clinic with Warren and Liz. A Chronicle piece called “Jeremiah Tower: The Star Behind Stars” noted gratuitously, “He is not insufferable.” And if I couldn’t get into trouble enough by myself, some reporters started currying favor by taking sides that were not even there. One said that Wolfgang Puck, “the over-hyped proprietor of Spago . . . couldn’t pull it off. His bars are little more than overpriced queues for patrons praying for a power table, whereas Jeremiah Tower . . .” and so on with more rubbish.
I wondered how long it would be before a writer unable to get a table at Stars would turn on me.
A Carmel newspaper wrote: “Some call Jeremiah Tower aloof, a snob. They say he doesn’t take telephone calls.” I wondered who had not reached me on the four phone lines at my desk, my car phone, or my cell phone, on which I was available seven days a week. Who had I jilted without knowing it?
With all this, I again made a vow not to read favorable publicity anymore. I knew that disaster was the only possible result of believing it. I would have my assistant hand me only the negative items, things that we could do something about. There was nothing I could do about the fawning and swooning and lapdogging. I knew I had to build a buffer against the press or else go mad.
Or maybe it was time to get out of Dodge.
I made a plan to sell Stars a year after the $l,350,000 buyout of the Moons, now with interest more like $5,000,000, was paid to the bank by 1992. Without shoveling money into the bank, cash flow would be great enough in one year to set me up, and the sale would let me live well. By 1993 I would be back in Sydney with a house above Bondi Beach near Neil Perry’s Blue Water Grill.
I didn’t hear God laugh until the earth shook.