CHAPTER 7
AMERICA AGAIN
I set out for Cambridge. Cathy and Michael were back in the same Green Street house, but this time they had planted the backyard garden with rows of baby lettuces from seeds brought from Italy and France. That street held too many memories for me, so I found a place in Boston’s Italian North End to be near the food markets, in the romantic notion that it would be like living in Europe. But the only European thing about the neighborhood was that it was more violent than Naples. The Italian mama across the hall turned out to be the mother of the local boss, so I was declared off-limits to stranger bashing, but my friends were not. Brushing aside the pasta hanging in the corridor, I made my peace with Mama and crossed the Charles River again. This time it was for a blue-collar Irish block near Inman Square in Somerville, where the rents for large houses with kitchens and dining rooms were cheap. There was also a decent fish market called Legal Sea Foods, where after a few months I convinced the owner to use the space next door as an experimental restaurant. Use up all the leftover fish in fish and chips so that what’s in the case each day is fresh, was what I told him. Later I was his first customer.
CHAMPAGNE WHILE THE WORLD CRUMBLES
Protests against the Vietnam War were breaking out across the nation, and Harvard Square was no exception. My disdain for a revolution without the proper Jacobite fashions had brought down polite but dedicated calumny on my head, so I decided to cook for revolutionaries instead of marching with them. Two street-kid dancers, poets, my brother—just in from Vietnam for R&R, radical architecture students, and the son of a senior counsel at the FBI were the guests at dinner to discuss my artistic and revolutionary stance.
After a few Polish frozen vodkas, the veins of their currently politically correct thinking ran not as deep as when they had first walked in the door and seen the enemy, my brother, who at my request was in full-dress Green Beret–Special Forces uniform. By the time we were deep into the red wine, they all saw him as having the same dignity as the rare and expensive Chateau Beychevelle 1962. Then I asked my brother’s advice for making Molotov cocktails.
“Use strong bottles.”
We filled the now empty bottles of Dom Pérignon with gasoline siphoned from my car, ripped up an old Hermès scarf to use for fuses, and hauled them in a Tiffany shopping bag to the campus. My champagne Molotovs bounced off the architecture school building, rolled down the street into a storm drain, and exploded.
So much for my militant radical phase.
I had about the same success at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. My passion for designing in-sea or underwater architecture habitats and resorts were too radical for Harvard. My other obsession, a bridge-and-tunnel design for linking England and France, went over equally badly. The professors insisted instead I involve myself with the real world of public housing. My reality response was a multimedia effort: cooking, film, music, and drugs. “Champagne While the World Crumbles.” A film loop of the atom bomb going off amid footage of the worst public housing projects and urban sprawl I could find. The music was Lou Reed, the food a huge platter of hashish fudge from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, the drink champagne.
Despite a sign saying eating more than two was at the eater’s risk, all the fudge was consumed. Most didn’t know what they were. At least five were gobbled up by a juror professor. Found three days later in some louche sink in Boston, he later told me that I was lucky not to be kicked out of school, and that I would have been had there not been a student revolution going on. In my senior year, he said, I would have to work on socially responsible projects. Over the summer I would have to think long and hard about myself.
I did.
And I realized that food was a more powerful weapon than architecture.
Mary Jane Butter
The quality of the grass you use to make this butter is up to you and your budget. We used to use whatever leftover sticks and seeds there were after harvesting the leaves. Obviously fresh is better. As for quantity, anything from two to six handfuls.
The butter is very good under the skin of a turkey to be roasted for Thanksgiving.
Handfuls cannabis 2 pounds butter
Put the cannabis in a 4-quart saucepan and fill ⅔ with water. Add the butter and bring to a boil. Simmer over very low heat for 1 hour, adding more water if necessary.
Drain through a fine sieve, discarding the plant material. Put the water with the butter floating on top in the refrigerator until the butter is hard. Discard the water, unless you have a penchant for it, and use the butter for cooking.
Mary’s Cookies
Makes about 20
2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
½ cup powdered sugar, sifted
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup Mary Jane butter (see above), cut in 1-inch cubes
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
Mix the flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl, and then mix in the butter. Form the mixture into a ball, and then roll out on a very lightly floured surface until ½ inch thick.
Cut out into your favorite shape with a cutter, place the pieces on a cookie-baking sheet, and bake for 30 minutes.
Cool on a rack and eat while still just warm.
EATING THE REVOLUTION
My only plans that summer of 1969 were to give political revolution one more chance—at the Black Panther conference in Northern California—and to sweet-talk my grandmother in Carmel. My grandfather had just died. The question of my generous allowance was very much up in the air. A week after the academic year ended, I packed my copy of Carlos Castañeda, started a new journal with a quote from John Cage about circumstances being in charge, and began a cross-country trip in my little green MGB GT. I had no set itinerary since I dreamed of a Norman Douglas South Wind kind of life (of giving in to one’s “fool”) and followed my stomach. What was to have been a tour of American architecture turned into a tour of its food, especially Louisiana and Southwest culinary festivals, New Mexico chili cookouts, and Texas barbecues. After a stop at my aunt Mary and Russian uncle’s for a dinner of those livers in eighteenth-century Madeira and my requested chicken Kiev, I set off for Louisiana, out of Washington and southbound down the Blue Ridge Parkway.
In Lafayette, Louisiana, I headed straight and ravenously for the crayfish festivals and a gumbo and crayfish dinner ($3.65) at the famous Normandie. Then to Morgan City and Don’s with its dozen freshwater oysters for $1.50, and on to New Orleans’s Hotel Pontchartrain, where I thought to myself if there was better Creole food in the United States it must be in heaven itself. After a breakfast at Brennan’s and “buster” crabs at Casamento’s, I headed west for Texas.
It was too late at night for any restaurants to be open, so I ate peyote instead, driving along the interstate listening to B. B. King and watching the oil burn-off lighting up the wide-open Texas night sky. In the ninety-eight-degree heat my iced ripe white peaches, dipped in freezing Coca-Cola from my backseat cooler, were heaven. Then after a wrong turn, I ended up in Houston’s ghetto and found an all-night and all-black soul food cafe where I had perfectly delicious barbecued meat loaf, even if eaten in a silence from the locals as thick as the glutinous mashed potatoes.
I stopped in San Antonio to visit some friends of my mother’s whom she adored for their huge warehouses of chilies and every conceivable Tex-Mex seasoning as much as their love of dancing tangos till dawn. After a five-hour lesson in southwestern spices, I headed to the Four Corners and the chili at Kelly’s Bar in Chama, New Mexico. After the superb green chili, which I noted was hotter even than the rocks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at high noon, I tore myself away, drove my four cylinders up into the Rockies, drove west, and drank from the cool upland glacier springs in Yosemite. Then it was down to the coast and into Carmel to negotiate my allowance and stock up for the Black Panther conference with a 1959 Lafite and 1963 Romanée-Conti from a local market.
Annoyed by the crude fascism of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), I headed back to nearby Big Sur to see the trout farm again, and to meet a forbidden couple.
Now that my grandfather was gone, I was finally emboldened to look up the Big Sur legends Emile Norman and Brooks Clement. My step-grandmother couldn’t have dealt with two male artists living together with scandalous frankness and enormous success, so her ancient Cadillac and I were off alone down the coast to the top of a mountain and their house set in the center of four hundred acres. After I knocked on the door, it slid open to reveal Emile Norman clad only in a towel. I was dressed in a jacket and tie as I would have been for lunch on my grandmother’s terrace.
“You can stay just the way you are, or get naked for lunch. It’s up to you.”
The Naked Lunch did it. Until this trip, I had never been seen in public without a jacket unless it was at a pool or on the rugby field. So this was a turning point in my life, and why I had come to California.
With pounding heart I took off my clothes and joined the two of them at a table set by an indoor pool surrounded by a vegetable garden in planters. The sun shone through an overhead vine of New Zealand climbing spinach, from which Emile was cutting leaves for a salad, while Brooks played Bach on an organ that was a replica of the composer’s own. Standing with my glass of champagne, looking out over the brown hills to the Pacific Ocean, I realized then that one could love and cook in a world entirely of one’s own choosing.
After a couple of magnums of red Burgundian Pommard and a screening of films they had taken of the young Masai holding hands and elephants and giraffes doing things no nature program had ever shown, it was time for the next course.
“May I help with dessert?” I offered.
“Yes, you may. You are the dessert.”
In no time I was telling Emile I would be moving to California as soon as possible.
DRINKING THE REVOLUTION: LAFITE IN THE STREETS
Back on the East Coast there was more revolution in the streets, Moratorium Day, and the March on Washington. Two dancers I’d met the previous spring took up residence with me in Somerville, and when Rudolf Nureyev came to town, my new friend the Harvard undergraduate and painter Philip Core called him. We went to see him at the Ritz. Philip had with him his script for a ballet on Nijinsky with Rudi in mind. While my favorite dancer spent an athletic night with Rudi, he with a bottle of Stoli in one hand, a boy in the other, Philip and I drank champagne, smoked Sobranie cigarettes nonstop, and read the script aloud. In the morning Rudolf told us that Margot Fonteyn was coming to town, and that we should look after her.
“Most often it’s lonely being famous,” he told me, “and she’s both.”
A few weeks later we summoned the nerve to call her and invite her to dinner at my house in Somerville, an invitation which, to our huge surprise, she accepted.
We had three hours to shop and cook. One of the streetwise dancers called me from the store. “I have some wine called L-A-F-I-T-E. Is it okay?”
It was, but who had the money?
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Is a ten-pound rib roast big enough?”
Half an hour later he returned, triumphantly. With no time for questions, I started to cook. Two hours later, when we answered a knock at the door, there was a breathtakingly beautiful Margot in floor-length white mink covering a basic black Yves St. Laurent dress and ropes of pearls, with a huge, disarming smile. And a slightly Cockney accent: “May we come in?” Her partner in dance—Richard Cragun from the Stuttgart, also in black but full leather, his crotch delicately festooned with chains—stood behind her.
Dinner for Margot Fonteyn, Richard Cragun, Philip Core, and the Street Dancers
February 16, 1970
Salmon Canapé
Roast Beef Ribs
Château Lafite, 1962
Creamed Spinach
Château Lafite, 1964
Green Salad Vinaigrette
Raspberry and Lemon Sherbets
Pirouettes
Café
Cointreau
After Margot’s second slab of beef and heavily into the Lafite, she commented on my generosity. I said she’d have to thank the two dancers as well. With great pride at having ripped off the Establishment, the dancers related that to support the revolution, they’d stolen the Lafite, beef, and Cointreau. I blushed, the boys beamed, Richard helped himself to more Lafite, and Margot let out peals of laughter. “Well,” she said, “if it has to be Lafite in the streets, so be it.”
A blizzard had set in during dinner, so I drove them back to the Ritz in an old silver Porsche, the boys squashed into the tiny back, Richard in the passenger seat with Margot on his lap. As we skidded around the deserted streets, all I could think of was how many millions of dollars of legs I had in that car, and how to drive passing a bottle of pink Veuve Clicquot champagne around so as not to spill it over her white mink.
The next morning the dancers and I awoke to riots in the streets again. We headed to Harvard Square. As we sat on the roof of the news kiosk in the center of the square, we were suddenly surrounded by police. One of the dancers pushed me off the roof into the arms of the other, did a grand jeté onto the roof of a squad car, and rebounded down into the subway with the two of us in hot pursuit. I went home to work on underwater space stations again, and after that close call the boys were in the mood for revolution eighteenth-century French style: more for dining while America burned than for burning it.
THOUGHT IS MADE IN THE MOUTH
Soon after, while having an all-aquavit dinner with my new girlfriend, Annie Meyer, a wonderful cook and granddaughter of the Washington Post and Newsweek founder Agnes Meyer, the windows of her apartment were blown out by some firebombing “students” in the street. We decided it was time to get out of town. I thought that it was time to grow up, or at least that that time was fast approaching. So I decided to leave the dancers behind and to move in with Annie. We rented a farm in Prides Crossing, north of Boston in the town of Beverly, where we started a vegetable garden and raised birds. But first we packed up the cats and put them into her Aston Martin DB5 and headed north to her family’s island in Maine.
The first day I read Euell Gibbons’s Stalking the Wild Asparagus, and as I contemplated the difference between stealing great ingredients and walking outside and gathering them, cooking took on a whole new life for me. I switched from reading Escoffier’s Ma Cuisine to a culinary mix of Rachel Carson, a nineteenth-century American housewives’ companion, and James Beard.
Dinner in Maine Having Read Euell Gibbons
May 22, 1970
Four nests of Eider ducks, each with four eggs.
In one, the eggs still wet. Took one.
Found samphire, sour sorrel, and lovage—or seacoast angelica.
As well as young dandelion.
Mussels, a bushel or so, some for salad.
Steamed Mussels with Samphire
Niersteiner Meisterkroner 1967
Spinach-sorrel noodles
Wild Asparagus, Vinaigrette
For lunch the next day we had a mussel salad with a mayonnaise made with more wild sorrel, shallots, wild horseradish, and mustard, thinned with a reduced white wine mussel broth. In the evening I dressed cooked lobster meat with a “lobster cream”—a paste of the coral, the fat lining the shell, and the liver mixed with mayonnaise and garnished with sea sorrel. We drank a perfect ten-year old Bollinger champagne from my favorite year of 1961.
Back in Prides Crossing I noted that my life now was books and food, when my Harvard college friend Philip Core sent me a note: “Food and Wine are the sex of art, and pasta is the bridge between the two.” I wrote back with Tristan Tzara’s “Thought is made in the mouth.” Cooking for friends was now more eloquent a revolution than politics. The directness of the menus said it all:
Lunch at Prides Crossing
Cold Salmon, Fresh Herb Mayonnaise
Château d’Yquem I947
Strawberries
Château d’Yquem 1966
The next night, after a pound of caviar and 1962 Dom Pérignon, Annie made the accusation that the only way I could communicate was by writing menus and then cooking them. True. We decided to take some time off from each other. While she was in Washington visiting her aunt Katharine “Kay” Graham, I read my dandy hero Robert de Montesquiou, wrote the outline for a book from one of his best phrases, “A Carnage of Geraniums,” planted fifty, and cooked.
YOUTH ON THE PROW AND PLEASURE AT THE HELM
I finished my “politically acceptable” public housing project—but my notebooks were now filled with the glories of old American picnics, systems of ocean farming and aquaculture (using dolphins as the staff), designs for the World’s Fair in Hawaii, which I heard was to be on the water, and California wines I should try. The allure of California and Hawaii became real, but not before one last-gasp attempt to create the European world that was as comfortable to me as old clothes—and as increasingly tattered.
I tried to make a living in Prides Crossing designing gardens for the rich. But they were not as rich as the people who had built the gardens, and thus knew and cared little about them. So I ended up just a gardener. It was a year in which our band of aesthetes graduated and dispersed—a year, as Philip Core said, that was “crowded with the wreckage of exhumed conversations.”
Meanwhile, I followed the advice of Carl Van Vechten, “Write as you feel and you will discover that your feeling is greater than your knowledge of it,” because I wanted to know what I did feel. I wrote “An Outline of Pleasures” after Colette, subtitled “The Sauce for Being Served Up.” I loved her “Pride in giving pleasure relieved them of the need for any other pleasure,” and “To receive from someone happiness—is it not to choose the sauce in which we want to be served up?”
I found myself truly beginning to travel into the silent and self-absorbed world of cooking in 1970 when I read Richard Olney’s just-published French Menu Cookbook. It bowled me over. I adored his claim that cooking the first time for his mentor, Georges Garin, he dared only “simple preparations.” I had a sneaking suspicion that I must be one of the few readers who felt calm at his calling Artichoke Bottoms with Two Mousses followed by ortolans, then cheeses and a “Tepid Apple Charlotte,” simple.
When I read, “The rock on which my church was built was the provincial kitchen of my home in Iowa,” I wondered what he would think of my rock: eccentric lives and the life of travel around the world with its great hotels, ships, and trains. I had been, like Olney, “cooking with a passion that could be gleaned from books—Escoffier, in particular.” Olney’s rock was Iowa. I looked around for mine. I wrote Richard, opened a bottle of 1888 Boal Madeira, and jotted down a rash of titles for proposed cookbooks: “Casting Pearls Before Wine,” “Culinary Suicides,” “Mental Cuisine,” “Octopus Bouquet,” and “Fraises Musclées.”
Something had to give.
Just as I was rethinking that old offer to work at The New Yorker, a call came from an old pal, Clay Shaw (the New Orleans architect who was accused of masterminding the Kennedy assassination), to work on the revival of New Orleans’s French Market. It was tempting, but I knew if I lived there I would fall even further back into my longing for the past: I would never leave lunch at Galatoire’s. So I left Annie and the farm, and headed on down to my sister’s beachfront apartment on the Jersey Shore to put aside my “Carnage of Geraniums” and rewrite it as my memoirs, “Camphor Ice.” A cure for what itches.
Perhaps then I could put the past behind me.
In June 1971 I finished Camphor Ice. Writing it did not cure my itch for the past, so I decided I could find the cure in Big Sur—the land of Emile Norman’s naked lunch. I cooked a last dinner on the East Coast for my sister’s fortieth birthday, finding parts of the menu from my new bible, Lucien Tendret’s La Table au Pays de Brillat-Savarin. I served Tendret’s famous “Le gateau de foies blonds de poulardes de Bresse, baigné de la sauce aux queues d’écrevisses.” Or baked loaf of blond liver mousse of Bresse chicken, bathed in crayfish sauce. I poured my last two bottles of wine, a 1962 La Tâche and an unlabeled 1927 vintage port. So now, with no wine and no money, I set out for California.
CALIFORNIA: AN IMMEDIATE OPENING
Heading west in a huge old Lincoln rental car with a childhood friend from England, we landed in San Francisco with seventy-five dollars, not enough to fund the final leg of my journey to Honolulu with my designs for the World’s Fair half under and half above the water. I showed the project around architectural offices, with no success. So once again I worked as a gardener.
The rest of the year was one of agony and attacks of nerves that left my nights full of demons, my days full of looking for a job, my skin scrofulous, and me writing a letter at 4 A.M. to Philip Core, the only pal who would understand. “As I lie here recovering from yet another evening of unsuccessful job-seeking charm and brilliance, wondering how could I again, in a room full of Indians from ancient Mexican jungles, Chinese, Japanese Burroughs, Swiss and Argentinian L’Uomo Vogue bathing-suit extravaganzas, end up tangoing ’til dawn in the arms of a Garcia Lorca lesbian from Cuba? Feeling like a venomous orchid, and am teetering on an edge beyond bankruptcy which has led better men than me to prison and to say ‘the only vice is shallowness.’ These last weeks have been a tornado of vortices, leading nowhere.”
On my thirtieth birthday, in 1972, I was down to twenty-five dollars.
I wrote in my journal: “Good thing to do at 1:15 A.M.: sit on toilet, drink beer, and read Dumas’ Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine.” The bookmark that fell out of that book was a menu from the RMS Mauretania dated forty-three years before, to the day. An omen, if the food was not. My father, at President Herbert Hoover’s table, ate grapefruit Maraschino before a petite marmite, fillet of sole, roast pheasant, pomme chips, salad of the season, and pouding glace Nesselrode. After reading the menu, I fell into a troubled sleep. From my notebooks of the time:
5 A.M.: In a Dream—In a Restaurant:
Steak with marrow bone filled with marrow soufflé
Baba (au rhum)
Puree of celery root
Sauce Périgord on steak
All on plate together.
My last hope, I felt, was the cure of Big Sur and Emile, who had given me the courage to embrace the freedoms of California in the first place. At a lunch he gave for Elizabeth Gordon (later editor of House Beautiful), the menu was cannelloni stuffed with wild boar, followed by persimmons with a mayonnaise flavored with fenugreek (to this day I love this dish). Over a superb, velvety Chapelle-Chambertin 1961 Elizabeth talked for hours of Alice B. Toklas, with whom she had traveled. Even on a trip to Venice when Alice was very old, Elizabeth said, she showed great courage and knowledge of where to find the best food in the markets along the canals. At the end of the lunch Elizabeth said, “Alice would have loved cooking with you.” I took that as an omen as well.
The next day at 1 A.M. I was werewolf awake at the sound of Big Sur coyotes outside my door, my sleep plagued with Mozartian black-sheeted figures trying to strangle me. After writing a suicide note—“The last of my silk shirts just died”—I read Wilde’s essay “De Profundis” again and the next day, back in San Francisco, cooked a last meal: goose soup and a Chambertin 1934, Cuvée Héritiers Latour.
I recovered and decided to live.
In San Francisco for a New Year’s apartment sitting for Michael and Cathy, I made a feast for one, and recorded the menu.
Dinner for One
San Francisco, 1972
“Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex.” Oscar.
The virtues of boiled garlic.
Spread on new bread and French butter.
I put it with marrow, a paste for toast.
Château d’Yquem 1967
When Michael returned, he told me that the little French cafe in Berkeley we had visited a couple of months before was looking for a chef. He showed me the ad in the newspaper.
“So what?” I said.
All I remembered from my one visit there two months before was the most perfect slice of fresh raspberry tart I had ever tasted. But by now any job was looking good. It seemed he could be right when he replied: “There’s more to it than a simple raspberry tart.”
Or could be.