By the time Stars was well under way with private parties, it could be said of the San Francisco’s gilded set’s pet, Jo Schuman, that “the best thing she makes for dinner is a reservation at Stars.” And that the food had to be good, but most particularly small, chic, not too odd (no feet, eyes, scales, or feathers), and sit easily on the stomach. After all, one’s guests might have just arrived by plane from eight time zones away, just had a four-hour lunch with the same people they were about to eat dinner with, and did not want to bulge out, even in the tiniest way, of the unique, made-for-the-evening Ferré, de la Renta, or Dior.
THE UGLY BUSINESS OF BEAUTIFUL WOMEN
Jo gave a dinner for Michael Gross, who was on the road for his book Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, a tricky business with Ann Getty, Carmella Scaggs, and Jeannette Etheridge at her table. To soften any assumed message she ordered an expensive wine. “Will everyone know how expensive it is?” Jo asked of the Chateau d’Yquem. “Not fifty thousand dollars for the 1787,” I told her, but they will know. The 1967 was famous enough to distract them all from the scattered standing ovations given to Joan Collins, fresh from Private Lives across the street, and the opera star Samuel Ramey, as they arrived ten minutes apart.
No food could be riveting enough to keep heads from snapping up when Nureyev walked in on the arm of the magnificently fabulous Kenneth Jay Lane jewel– covered Dodie Rosekrans for the party given for him by producer Carole Shorenstein Hays after the opening night of The King and I. One did excuse oneself for staring at the couture babushka on Natalia Makarova or the Cossack sable on Danielle Steel, especially after Rudi pulled at the baggy pants of his Kenzo and told Dodie they made “his bum look big.” One had to look somewhere.
Sometimes the conversation was so fast nothing else could keep up. Nan Kempner opened one lunch, when asked about her travels, with “Well, one cannot live by blood alone.” She was referring to an impoverished member of royalty she had met at Valentino’s party in Rome—or maybe she had met him at Malcolm Forbes’s birthday party in Tangier. Both events were all anyone could talk about—as well as about who from San Francisco had been invited. Denise had, and everyone knew it.
With moments like that I knew the food had to be serviceably delicious but uncompetitive for attention. Saks Fifth Avenue’s Rose Marie Bravo’s lunch for the impeccably groomed Georgette Mosbacher dropped the bombshell that her new perfume cost fifteen hundred dollars an ounce. That brought silence to the table and, for an endless minute, the food was the center of attention. After all, Vicky Tiel’s perfume, launched at a Stars dinner the night before with the same guests, was only three hundred dollars, even if she did call it “Nudes All Around.” Denise Hale’s Jungle Gardenia from Walgreens cost only twenty dollars! No one knew which one Jimmy Galanos was wearing, or how much it cost, but the sweet smells of success were definitely in the air and overpowering the aromas of food and wine. If it wasn’t perfume it could be smoke. So for George Hamilton, fresh from introducing me to Imelda Marcos in Manila, and now introducing his line of cigars, we served lobster and champagne and finished with peaches and cherries soused in ten-year-old Old Weller bourbon.
SOCIAL FOOD
Raw garlic or onions were never served. Social food by the eighties and nineties had to service jaded if always appreciating palates but never distract from the real business at hand: chat and people summing up while the other diners in the room watched. The young people, as Ann Getty called them, paid a bit more attention. Viscountess Serena, in a very un-English comment about the food, adored her chicken at Denise’s dinner for her and her husband, David, Viscount Linley, in town to show off his new book, Classical Furniture. With guests introduced with names like Prince Alexandre de Borbón-Dos Sicilias y de Habsburgo-Lorena, one could not eat with one’s mouth full of complex food. And with the “young people” I could be more in charge if I had to be. Billy Getty and Gavin Newsome always knew what they wanted, but not all did. And since Stars donated the food at the fund-raising dinner for 180 guests of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum organized by Auschwitz survivors and by Gay and Lesbian Campaign leaders Tyne Daly and Mark Leno, I chose chicken. “Banquet chicken was raised to new heights,” raising $150,000 that night alone. Even though I cooked the chicken myself, I knew it was really Michael Tilson Thomas sitting at Stars’ grand piano and playing “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” that covered up the fact that it was only chicken, after all.
By this time I had told my chefs the menu rules for special dinners at Stars many times: by all means remember that there might be guests too polite to disrupt the evening by saying they had the flu, that their jet lag was worse than a crash from carb overdose, that they were on a diet, that they were really vegetarian, that they were allergic to shellfish, that they had just arrived from an inescapably late lunch, that this would be their eighth social meal in a row, that they hated lamb, or that they couldn’t look rabbit in the face.
A Dinner for Sophia Loren
March 31, 1995
Mushroom Timbale
Fava Beans and Purple Asparagus
Smoked Pheasant
Oven-Roasted Vegetables and Lamb’s Lettuce Salad
Ginger Mousse
Warm Ginger Cookies
The idea of the timbale was its small size so that guests could pick at it and make it look as if it were mostly eaten—just in case they hated mushrooms, or cream. Then they could eat the fava beans and push the color-coordinated asparagus around if they were nervous about it, as some people are. The pheasant was breast only, delicious but innocuous in its way, and once again, one could pick at it and eat the vegetables or salad instead. As for the ginger mousse, small again (everyone is allowed to pick at dessert), and no one can resist cookies four minutes out of the oven.
The Italian consul general and his wife said this dinner was the highlight of Sophia’s and Carlo Ponti’s visit to the Bay Area, even when Herb Caen had announced in advance the menu and the fact that the dessert sounded like the name of a Tenderloin stripper. In this case, everyone ate everything. I was nervous because I had been told that Sophia ate only pasta for lunch (I was not going to cook pasta for an Italian) and sandwiches for dinner. Admirable. Me too. And what food could compete with those lips (signature “Coral Nude”), those eyes, that hair, cheekbones “so defined you could hang laundry on them,” and “those, um . . . that poitrine.” More worried than I were some of San Francisco’s beauties. As Cynthia Robins of the Examiner said, they were “in a swivet” and grabbing their cleavages every time Sophia swept by. All except Daru, whose own famous poitrine held up perfectly. Bob Colacello was worried only about his Neopolitan Brooklyn family Italian or, in his own case, Bensonhurst. Everyone agreed with San Francisco’s greatest beauty (here unnamed) that Sophia at sixty was “the most glamorous woman in the world.”
DINNERS FOR COUTURE
Dinners for couture were the most difficult because one had to assume each of the guests was as figure conscious as anyone could be, and that having to wear a Calvin Klein (in town for a fashion show at I. Magnin and Denise’s dinner for him at Stars), for example, that had not been worn since the beginning of the season and now many dinners later might not fit, could leave a bad taste in the mouth no matter how good the food.
For Vicky Tiel it was beluga and potatoes washed down with magnums of 1983 Roederer Cristal; for Jil Sander (“She’s fantastic, the female Armani,” I had said to the press) grilled Nantucket scallops with tomato basil sauce; for Bill Blass, grilled wild Pacific salmon with sweet corn and heirloom various-colored tomato salad with peach cobbler to follow; and for Oscar de la Renta with Danielle Steel in a Ralph Lauren military tunic (she had checked her Oscar coat) and Nan Kempner (“I just love Stars”) and New York’s Rose Marie Bravo (“You outdid yourself; I can’t tell you how much I miss Stars”) it was Japanese eggplant timbale with chilied crab (“now Oscar’s favorite dish”).
When Gianfranco Ferré came to town and Denise gave a dinner or lunch at Stars, I could rev the food up a bit. After a few weekends at the Hale Ranch with Gianfranco, I knew him well enough to know he would have been disappointed if I hadn’t. It was a dinner for “stargazing and grazing.”
Dinner for Gianfranco Ferré
Celery Root Gratin
Scallop Hash and Lobster Vinaigrette
Grilled Lamb Medallions
Artichoke Bottoms Filled with Chickpea Puree
Wild Strawberry Soufflé
Gianfranco dined on plain rice. “I’m not well,” he said. “It must have been the caviar on the Concorde.”
PURE SAN FRANCISCO
It was a typical Saturday night. The time quoted to walk-ins was one hour and forty-five minutes, with everyone waiting for the opera crowd to leave at 7:45. Paul Pelosi had just incapacitated the dining room manager into a fit of giggles by telling the valet parker Solomon, “Park my car in her trunk,” as Jo Schuman pulled up in a stretch limo. The giggles left five reservation lines blinking with a promise of more scenes if those diners ever showed up. A gossip columnist was on the phone wondering what I would serve for the Harper’s Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis’s dinner (curried crabmeat soufflés) to promote her new book, No Time to Die. Mayor Willie Brown had a reservation for eight o’clock and didn’t show. Danielle Steel did show up with her matched Graff “D” flawless diamond twins, and I had not alerted the security or insurance companies. Francis Ford Coppola was there for drinks only (had to get back to work) but after a drink decided “to stay for starters,” making a scramble for the staff to set another place at Denise’s already tight table; then the great Escada-tiger-print and rhinestone-covered Charlotte “Tex” Swig kissed her husband, George Shultz, good-bye, so he wasn’t staying. Bob Colacello lost his pen—then it was found with Francis signing autographs. Peter Coyote lost his diamond ear stud, so Dodie Rosekrans’s otherwise very conservative husband borrowed Frances Bowes’s gold bead ones, first trying them on himself and thereby reducing the rather fey maître d’ to yet another fit of incapacitating giggles.
There was a birthday party in the Grill Room and a bat mitzvah in the other private room that needed his attention. Matthew Broderick was competing with that year’s gold medalist downhill skier from the Bay Area for the ogling of women, and leaving not a few of Stars’ cooks serving the oyster bar slack-jawed and weak-kneed. The Fat Boys across the dining room were showing ogling diners their necks and arms, heavy with more Los Angeles gold bling and New York diamond-district bracelets than all the socialites put together.
A cockroach had found its way up from the basement, despite the weekly bombing, and was doing a Rockettes routine along the wainscoting next to a particularly fastidious and now hysterical prima donna. The Stars doctor was dining on the edge of the Ferré party and drinking a twenty-five-year-old Petrus, which I was hoping no one in the party would see and then ask for. Regulars Jim and Jo O’Dea were at their usual table and alcoholically itching for a fight. Or Petrus.
“It’s pure San Francisco,” the O’Deas told Pat Steger of the Chronicle’s “Social Scene” column.
“I couldn’t care less who’s here,” said another patient customer. “I just want a table.”
DINNER FOR WHAT GLITTERS
Particularly close to the metaphor in my heart was the dinner we did to help launch Faking It, Kenny Jay Lane’s book about what was not real but still glittered. I repeated the menu we had just done for hostess Denise for her gold-plated David Rockefeller dinner, though without the 1983 Dom Pérignon en magnum.
Black Truffle Custard
Prawn Vinaigrette
Capon Breast with Lobster Sauce
Fava Beans, Wild Asparagus, Garden Peas
Passion Fruit Soufflé
Warm Ginger Cookies
Kenny was dressed in a double-breasted glen plaid suit and yellow tie, long before they became powerful, and had a warm cookie in each hand as he regaled the table with stories of Sophia Loren, Judith Leiber’s objets (he did the first ones using dime-store plastic bracelets), the Duchess of Windsor, and Jackie Onassis (she couldn’t find any faux cabochon jewels of poor enough quality to copy the $250,000 “piece of junk” that Ari had given her).
Not junk, glittering, and definitely not fake was Dede Wilsey’s diamond the size of an iceberg, and almost the same color, though not below the waterline. It was so large that when Nancy Pelosi saw it, she literally stopped talking in midsentence, not an easy feat for a politician (someone wagged). Denise’s diamond-and-sapphire David Webb necklace shone like a stand of Christmas lights, and Sally Jordan’s watermelon-slice Judith Leiber minaudière looked more delicious than the soufflé (someone else wagged).
Others raved about the soufflé with gossip columnist Pat Steger, saying that if most of the jewels were not real, at least the real J.T. was there, but wondered about the two matching diamond rose brooches on Ann Getty’s left shoulder.
Definitely always real were Connie Wald and Princess Genevieve “Geni” di San Faustino, as were the gorgeous pink ranch roses from Denise’s country garden: “I talked to my roses for a week and told them not to let me down.” Some of them did, so Ray Reddell had to step in with a few hundred of his own old-fashioned ones, and so started a real revolution in which roses—old or new—were considered chic.
At a party for the Hale’s anniversary, David Pleydell-Bouverie, who owned the Sonoma ranch on which M. F. K. Fisher lived, said the decorated dining room looked “quite chic.” Everyone knew that he knew. Five hundred candles in pink-lined (more flattering to anyone over forty, as most were) shades were set among every white lily available strewn across the green-moiré tablecloths sprinkled with little gold stars. H.R.H. Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia wondered all night if the stars were real, until Constance Towers (married to John Gavin) plastered a few stars across her décolletage before getting up to sing “My Romance,” really meaning “yours” (the Hales’), so that wasn’t real. But Mitzi Gaynor’s response to Carol Channing calling out that she couldn’t hear her singing was real enough: “Tough.”
The night went on longer than the premiere of War and Peace, playing that same night at the Opera House, and definitely real were the thousands of dollars lost to Stars (we had closed Stars that Saturday night for Denise) by not having the hundred or so people coming over for champagne at the end of the performance. For the lesser thousands in tips lost to the staff, I reminded them of Dodie’s remark when looking at the crowded dance floor: “Don’t dance with anyone you don’t like.”
MUSICAL CHAIRS
Some people, no matter what we did, were never happy where we sat them. But all was forgiven if they liked to eat. A trim (in grand opera terms) “superstar” Luciano Pavarotti in 1994 could not find a place that made him happy, or at least we could not. No drafts were allowed (understandably, given what a cold could do to his performance), and no one was permitted to walk behind him. But he wanted to sit in the center of the room, where everyone could see and greet him.
I put him near the kitchen and was the only person allowed to walk behind him. He rather liked the dinner (“un grande complimento—una cucina grande”)—or just loved Stars because we used to sneak him ice cream onto the cafe table onstage during Bohème when he was supposed to be on a diet.
Un Grande Complimento
Timbale Golden Oyster Mushroom with Mussels, Nasturtiums, Sage Flowers
Wild Turkey and Rabbit-Filled Pasta “Pillows” with Truffled Celery Root
Braised Beef Cheeks with Ramps, Carrots, Red Mustard Gremolata
Warm Apricot, Hazelnut, and Pear Tartlet
“The beef cheeks were a hit at the dinner,” Pat Steger reported in her column, “but before getting down to the beef, Luciano got around to hugging and kissing a few cheeks.” Of course the O’Deas were there, getting ready to try to top Patty Rouas, who, clad in the latest Hervé Leger, looked disapprovingly at Pavarotti and said in a stage whisper, “The waif look is out. Full figures are in.”
LUNCH FOR A PET
Not all celebrities were two-legged. Some four were Stars regulars. Like Bentley, a famous seventeen-year-old basset hound.
The San Francisco journalist Rob Morse reported, “On Tuesday Warren Hinckle [journalist extraordinaire himself] threw a touching wake at Stars for his beloved Bentley, who had to be put to sleep. Actually, it was a pre-wake, because Bentley attended. Chef Jeremiah Tower served Bentley magnificently. We’ll miss him, but maybe not his fleas.” The meal was attended by San Francisco’s district attorney and sheriff in case anyone became stroppy about dogs at the bar. Jack Davis, the man who made mayors in that town, had arranged the postprandial transportation to Pets Unlimited, a wide-load and superlong-bedded open truck, onto which a kennel had been strapped in place of the usual bulldozer.
Bentley’s Lunch
Grilled Ground Chuck
with bacon
Evian in a Silver Dish
“His ashes,” said Hinckle, “will be delivered to Art Agnos, who, when he was mayor, once kidnapped Bentley and threatened to do away with him.” Not everyone likes dogs lapping up spilled Bushmills at the bar.
DINNERS FOR MEDIA
“With your fingers. Just tear them apart,” said Martha Stewart. And she should know, as “the elegant expert on entertaining.” She was talking not about the fawning reporters but about the quail.
White Oregon White Truffled Salt Cod Puree
Lobster and Oyster Vinaigrettes
Quail in a Brioche Nest
filled with foie gras, black truffle sauce
A Mere Trifle
Wild Blackberry Sauce
Actually, for this, another Jo Schuman dinner at Stars in 1994, the quail were boneless, so a single swipe with a knife would have done quite well.
Denise Hale (“San Francisco’s most gracious and successful party giver”) had helped Jo plan the party, and it was a perfect time for Martha and Denise to compare notes on what makes for perfect entertaining. The men at the dinner (even Denise’s husband and another who kept his private jet on hand for their trips to Hong Kong) could have heard “There are so few interesting men,” but they were too busy looking at women to listen. Martha was signing their copies of Menus for Entertaining even though Denise had predicted no men would be interested. “Even empresses can be wrong,” wagged a guest.
But if you have a very attractive man, like the Comte de Chandon de Briales, as guest of honor, then surround him with ladies. Martha agreed. So did all the men with Denise: “Always have on hand some very attractive girls who are amusing, very beautiful,” because the most important ingredient for a successful party is the choice of people.
Especially the unattached: “You have to have single people. You can have couples and it’s a quiet dinner, but it’s not a party.” Denise knew this well—she had once asked the advice of the greatest party expert before Martha, Elsa Maxwell. “My child,” replied the diminutive and rotund trouser-roll Elsa, “be ruthless whom you invite.”
Both Denise and Martha agreed with Dodie’s dance advice. Invite only the people you like, and never bores.
“A bore is a bore is a bore.”
Choose from the many walks of life, and choose people as different as possible as long as they are interesting.
“Whatever they do they have to be the best at it.”