For ten years my team at Stars had been my soul mates, but now there were signs of hairline cracks in the bonds that had held us together even through all the early partner disputes, the drama surrounding our meteoric rise to success, and the lawsuits.
It didn’t help when, in 1993, we were sued (again) for wrongful termination.
“Oh, that,” I said carelessly.
And AIDS discrimination.
“Oh, dear.”
When I first met the lawyer who had trumped up the charges against Stars, Kafka’s Trial and Metamorphosis somehow combined into one. He had the same kind of black-eyed greed as the sewer-loving bugs I saw in the garbage left by the homeless in the urine-filled parking garage of the Civic Center. But the charges could hardly be taken seriously, and thinking the usual exterminators would do the trick, I called the lawyers.
The plaintiff had been terminated a few years before when I was out of town. Human resources and the dining room manager, Tony Angotti, had called to say that a waiter had lied to some customers, given them what they said was compromised service, tampered with the guest check to cover up his errors, and lied to his supervisors about the incident. My final permission was required to help protect us against wrongful termination suits, and to prevent any ganging up by the managers against one of the staff. I asked if they had processed this potential firing by the book: were there a minimum of three documented discussions and counseling in his file? More than three, they assured me, with witnesses, and signed by the waiter himself. They insisted the action was deserved, just, and, with respect to the labor board rules, watertight. I consented, and then double-checked the file when I returned.
Three years later the waiter was hospitalized with full-blown AIDS and the family needed money. So who better to sue than the perceived closest, easiest, and, they thought, deepest pockets?
There was always someone around trying to extort money from Stars. This case was thrown summarily out of court. And thrown out again at another hearing. And then again. When after the third time the judge had had enough and told the waiter’s attorney to desist, the attorney sent me a letter. It said that he knew he had no case, but that if he ever got me in front of a San Francisco jury, he would destroy me.
Some months later he did his best.
During that time the California Supreme Court ruled that all wrongful termination suits had to be heard in front of a jury. Retroactively. That meant me.
I was told on a Wednesday that a trial was set for the following Monday, rushed because the plaintiff was dying.
My hastily called deposition was no good: I simply could not remember a three-year-old incident that had taken ten minutes of my time on the phone from Hong Kong and a quick staff file search. As for all the staff, customers of Stars, and most of my best friends who had died of AIDS since we opened in 1984, those memories were well buried. Unearthing did not come easily.
I got my initial whiff of danger when, on the first day of the trial, a large photo of the dying waiter with tubes up his nose was left in the courtroom for all to see. Sitting in the courtroom were two attorneys, my regular protector Richard Collier and regular customer Jim O’Dea, himself a legal hit man for Boston’s more dubious Irish politicos in older and rougher days. Having him defend me would have been like having Mayor Daley as an attorney in Chicago, and I considered asking him to take over the case. But a sense of fairness to my insurance company attorneys handling the case tripped me up, and I didn’t switch.
The list of my alleged sins was long, saying I had cared nothing for any of the staff and had brutalized them, particularly the gay staff, for years. I was flabbergasted that the opposing attorney was allowed to spit out these lies in court. Both his scribbled note admitting to me they had no case and the previous judge having dismissed the charges three times were inadmissible.
I sat for four days as the waiter’s lawyer hurled insults and charged me with arrogance and an “uncaring” attitude. To an extent the charge was true: I didn’t care about this at best mediocre waiter who was now trying to extort $13 million out of me. I’d barely known or talked to him—a fact his lawyer twisted as proof that I cared for none of the staff. Why would I care to pick on a waiter, I wondered, if I did not care for any of them? And there was a catch-22. I was accused of illegally looking in an employee’s private file, but of not looking long enough to discern that his serial absences were the consequence of AIDS. I must have known he had AIDS, they said, because he was gay. In my eyes discrimination in itself, but what would I know. It was in fact illegal for me as his employer to have concerns he was gay!
Called to the stand, I was a terrible witness, overwhelmed by the long list of gay male waiters I had allegedly pilloried, starting with our first fatal cases of AIDS. Both I had supported privately, paying two thousand dollars a month or a quarter of my salary for AZT. I was hoisted on my own petard of old-fashioned English manners. The American part of me didn’t come out of me in time when accused of sending these men to early deaths. I broke. A month earlier a close friend and loyal Stars customer had actually died while on the phone with me from his hospital bed as I was telling him I would be right over with his Stars hamburger. I choked at that memory and rose to leave. I saw the gloating smile from the opposing attorney, the approaching bailiffs, the understanding judge, the incredulous faces of the people in the courtroom, and the mixed looks of believers and unbelievers in the jury box. I wondered how I could have let things come to this.
THE BILL IS FINALLY DUE
The bill was finally coming due for every sin I had ever committed. Every sarcastic remark, every hour not spent counseling an employee who had broken the rules or screwed up, every flashbulb moment not shared with one of my chefs too late for the shoot, every huge bonus that was not big enough. One ex-employee prosecution witness after another testified that I had not taken them to New York or London or Paris, that I had played favorites. And that I never had taken employees who were on probation or consistently late for work. Only in San Francisco would this make sense to a jury, and it did.
The trial started on my fifty-first birthday and went for two weeks. My friends botched their best efforts to protect me, and others, who had done very well out of Stars and gone on to big jobs in the United States and abroad, exaggerated and outright lied in front of that impressionable jury. Sitting and hearing that, I felt cut off from everyone and everything. All I could think of were my Burmese cat and my BMW motorbike. Give me a tank of gas and I would be out of there with only a saddlebag of cash on one side and the cat on the other. No wonder the jury felt I was “distant.”
Herb Caen had taken care of the verdict the week before the trial when he printed that I was getting my “just desserts.” Only in San Francisco could political expediency take precedence over years of personal loyalty. The politically gay activists, who for years had been fed by my hand, joined Herb and were now ready to bite it. Suddenly I was political death in San Francisco. After the prosecution lawyer opened the trial saying that the million dollars I had raised for AIDS research and hospices had been to hide my alleged anti-homosexuality politics, a rumor went out that ACT UP was going to come in and trash Stars. No one knew where to hide, but it certainly was not behind me. I called my pals at the North Station, all good Italian and Irish cops. They knew what to do. The moment the ACT UP clowns started brownshirt tactics in Stars, the police were there to arrest them. Now I was even more a pariah.
The closing arguments were on the Monday before Thanksgiving. Everyone knew a verdict would come in Wednesday afternoon since the jurors wouldn’t want to be back in court on Friday. While they were out deliberating, I attended the punitive damages hearing with the judge and the smugly confident opposing lawyer, who doubtless had visions of moving from his Tenderloin (very seedy part of town) apartment-office to a downtown suite, where he could put out a brass plaque commemorating the destruction of Jeremiah Tower.
Then he went ballistic when he discovered that I owned nothing. Nothing worthwhile to him, that is, and nowhere near the punitive $13 million that he saw in his dreams. Stars without a noncompete clause and still paying off the bank was worthless. The cat wouldn’t have him. The apartment was rented, the cars leased. My cookbooks, worth a hundred grand, seemed like too many Joy of Cooking to his eyes. I gave them all the records. Now he was speechless. My best Cheshire cat smile drove him over the top. The judge’s similar smile didn’t help. A sweet moment.
The jury filed in and sat down without looking at me. That moment I knew for sure, as I did when my pathetic insurance attorneys moved one step back and to the side of me.
“We find for the plaintiff.”
GUILTY
Who else could they find for.
As the verdict was read out, all the jurors but two only gave me looks of hate. I had nothing to say to them or to my counsel. I reached into my jacket pocket and caressed the first-class one-way Cathay Pacific ticket to Hong Kong that I’d bought the day before. I wondered if I could get out of town in time to use it. I expected a sheriff with handcuffs and an orange jail suit for me, but no one appeared except the reporters, whom I had kept fully employed for two weeks. The room seemed weirdly still immediately around me, but outside that cocoon-like realm there was a chaos of camera lights and microphones on gaffs shoved into my face. Finally a reporter’s yell got through my daze: “Any comment?”
“No, thank you very much,” were my only words—ones widely reported the next day as evidence of my unrepentant arrogance. More petard hoisting.
On the jury was a Presbyterian spinster minister who had frowned on me with disapproval for ten days. When the award came in far less than demanded—approximately one four-hundredth of the $13 million requested—it was because of this woman, a caretaker for transgenders with AIDS. Only in San Francisco could I have been so reviled and then so oddly saved. From bankruptcy. It turned out that the jury was split ten to two, the other dissenter being Penny Alexander, an executive search consultant. She later told the San Francisco Chronicle, “I was amazed at how ineffective the system is. I always assumed that it worked, that it was fair. But it’s amazingly unfair and in no way gets at the truth of anything. There is no such thing as a trial by your peers.”
I was hissed at by my peers at an ARC (AIDS-related complex) benefit a few days later. Later, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation would withdraw my selection for the Community Service Award, bestowed on an individual “who has made hastening the end of the HIV/AIDS epidemic an urgent priority in their life.” They wrote they were sure I would understand.
I did perfectly.
“You are so dear to us,” they added. The “so” suggested not dear enough.
A month after the trial the California Supreme Court revised the decision that had landed me before a jury. The previous retroactive was now unconstitutional.
One of my first post-trial crisis management acts was to take down from the wall in the VIP section of the dining room all the photos of fading stars and put up new ones of younger, cooler, and hipper ones. Gone was the large photograph of Robin Leach and me engaging in the sport of champagne drinking because it was captioned “The mediagenic master of faux familiarity has fashioned a career out of celebrity voyeurism.” The line referred to Robin but was printed on top of my image—an irony I’d enjoyed until people believed it of me.
But I knew I had to keep up the front that I was still functioning and that Stars would be the same despite the exodus of all Civic Center arts and governmental functions. I walked up the street and leased a shiny new and very big Mercedes.
THE EMPEROR’S CLOTHES
We kept up appearances, but nothing was ever the same again. Confidence and loyalties had been stretched to the limits, and the original team started to fall apart.
Mark Franz had been my star pupil at the California Culinary Academy and, after a stint cooking for fishermen in wilderness Alaska, had run the kitchens at Santa Fe Bar & Grill and Stars. Mark was the one who knew my palate, and no one could see inside the soul of my food the way he could. Also Mark was one of the boys, and the leader to whom the testosterone-driven young cooks could relate when my role to them may have sometimes seemed other-planetary. Steven Vranian (the one who got lost in Manhattan in the van on our way to Newport in 1983) had been our great grill chef. Now he was in charge of buying and storing the food. No one could organize a storeroom or walk-in refrigerator as maniacally, or knew better that a restaurant’s food could never be truly great without those controls, and that keeping track of and properly storing newly arriving perfect ingredients was the only way to prevent them from turning into ordinary ones. Noreen Lam, also from the CCA, was in charge of Stars Cafe. Like Mark and Steven she knew the food I wanted. And no one could set the standards with prep cooks as she. Her infinite patience and willingness to take the time to teach and create perfection never lagged.
Others had come and gone, but these managers were the core, the conscience of Stars’ philosophy and its quality standards. They were the ones who trained any newcomers, managers, or line staff in what it was all about. For a long time we all got along swimmingly.
I am not sure which came first: their doubt that they wanted to go on managing Stars, or my doubt that they could manage Stars with their conflicting emotions about staying. Money was not an issue since I had been paying them generous sums for the time. It would have been deserved and practical to make them partners in Stars, but before 1988 the stock was not mine to give, and after that, at least until 1993, its ownership would have been encumbered with lawsuits, potentially huge punitive damages, and enormous capital gains taxes.
In my heart I knew that different bones thrown to them probably would not work, but I still hoped they would. Mark had always said that he was in my shadow, a place we both knew he found, at least for a while, more comfortable than being on his own. I hoped a good compromise with him was a country restaurant that he could call his own. Feeling guilty about not making him a partner, I bought and gave him Stars Oakville Cafe in Napa and my BMW 750IL to go with it. He probably didn’t want either, so things became even more complicated. With those kinds of emotions the year before he left, we often passed like ships in the night. A few years later Mark told a reporter what it was like working for a man who he said was unpredictable, moody, and an unrelenting perfectionist. “You never knew if you were going to get your ass kicked or what. You could really get roasted for doing the wrong thing, but he was always a gentleman with me.”
Steven had always said that he wanted for his children the same kinds of advantages that he had had as a child, while traveling around South America, so I hoped that Stars Singapore would be what he wanted. I knew that Noreen’s hometown, Honolulu, was calling strongly to her but hoped that she would want first to travel among the new Stars, including the Peak Cafe in Hong Kong, to teach her dedication to perfection to new staff.
As I had never let personal relationships stand in the way of adventure, I missed an increasingly important point. Single when we bonded at the Santa Fe Bar & Grill, the team members were now married, soon to be, or in lasting relationships. They needed a stable future, and one that shed its own light on them. When they realized that the kind of drama that surrounded us at Stars was not inevitable, they looked further than the light shining from it, a light still visibly shining, but originating perhaps in the past, as if from a now-dead star.
I knew Mark was in trouble when one Sunday afternoon, as I was setting up to cook the menu I had chosen for Jacques Pépin that night, Mark more or less demanded that I step aside because he wanted to show Pépin that he could cook without me.
I should have said no.
I knew that there was something more wrong than just this dinner as I saw him bring out more and more bottles of Sapporo. He was well into the beer by the time Jacques arrived. Without me he could cook magnificently, but that night he self-parodied both in his choice of menu and in how he served it.
After the Pépin dinner, Mark and I were a bit leery of each other, wondering how two people who trusted each other with their lives could find it so difficult on any given day just to sit down and say the situation was merde.
First to quit in the mid-nineties was my great dining room manger, Tony Angotti, who had held the service staff together with a sympathetic but iron fist before heading off to Las Vegas. After he left, the remaining team members started vying for each other’s reputations and salaries, given that it was plain that we could not go on paying flush-times salaries in the downturn days of the Civic Center. After Tony, Noreen left, and then Steven. Finally, a year later, Mark came in from Napa to the boardroom when we were all actually discussing the problems in Napa and quietly told me, as a gentleman, that he was through at Stars.
That was the second time I should have gone down into the basement, turned on the gas, and lit a match. My beneficiaries were the core team members, and they would finally have owned Stars, or whatever was left of it.
BREAKING UP
After the team broke up I changed my will to benefit a home for retired donkeys of Calcutta—showing what I thought of the endless stream of new managers who came in. They were impressed with the reputation, the honors on the walls, and the superlatives lavished on me and Stars, but they had never lived them. Now Stars had no one apart from me who knew fact from legend. Dressing these new people up as consorts was a challenge as big as showing any interest in the process myself. To find a way out, and to recover from the exhausting holiday season, I took off for my spiritual home: Paris, and a large, luxury hotel room. In January 1996, after my obligatory walk in the Tuileries Gardens outside the hotel, I went to find solace at Rudolf Nureyev’s grave on the anniversary of his death, where I laid an enormous bouquet of white lilies for this friend who had died of AIDS. As I stood there in the rain, the television cameramen asked me to pick up the flowers and put them down again. And again. I politely refused. Something in me snapped when they became angry. I now look back at that moment as the birth of my growing realization that I was as little interested in the sacrifices of being a star as Rudi was before he died. After weeping into a couple of dozen Bélons at La Coupole with a Brazilian picked off the Avenue Foch, and realizing the beautiful flesh at the table with me held no emotional support for me anymore, I canceled my visit to Guy Savoy’s new concept everyone was talking about: that all famous restaurants should have a cafe. Oh really! And called Air France. Given my history with Guy and with this cafe concept, even back to the days of Panisse, I realized all the ironies at play. But it was time to gird my defenses and set off for New York, where I was to get up onstage and accept an award without noticeably looking around to see who was still throwing stones.