The United States of Arugula (12 page)

Baum, a sharp, hard-charging graduate of Cornell University’s hotel management school, was a born showman and a font of ideas, lots of them ridiculous, like adorning desserts with sparklers and serving “three-clawed lobsters” at the Newarker. By no means immune to bad taste, he often undermined his good ideas with gaudy excess—another of his RA creations, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, which opened in 1960, was the restaurant equivalent of a Cinerama swords-and-sandals epic: a huge restaurant in Rockefeller Center meant to evoke the Roman Empire, with Cecil B. DeMille decor, cutesy menu descriptions (a salad was called “The Noblest Caesar of Them All”), and silver gladiator helmets for ice buckets. Even though it actually served good food—Mimi Sheraton, at that time an ex–
Village Voice
restaurant critic who was doing menu research for RA, remembers an “herb-scented chicken baked in clay that was cracked open most fragrantly at the table”—the Forum wasn’t taken seriously as a fine-dining destination. Like a lot of Baum brainstorms, it hemorrhaged money and didn’t last long.

Yet Baum, unlike many later theme-joint impresarios, actually cared about food; in fact, many in the food world credit him with coining the term “foodie” to describe a person inordinately obsessed with restaurant-going and cooking fashions. And when he and RA’s president, Jerry Brody, were opening a restaurant in the Seagram Building that was to change its decor and its menus with the seasons, he turned to Beard for his intimate knowledge of traditional, seasonal American cooking. The Four Seasons, which opened in July of 1959, was and is best known for its stunning Philip Johnson design, its giant Picasso tapestry, its needly Richard Lippold sculpture that hangs above
the bar, its Mies van der Rohe chairs, its undulating beaded drapes, its Zengraceful Pool Room, and its muscular, masculine Grill Room. But its eclectic menu had Beard’s fingerprints all over it, those of “a citizen of Oregon with the wish list of an always-hungry American,” to quote the restaurateur George Lang, who was in charge of new projects for RA.

There were dishes that Henri Soulé would never go near, like an Amish ham steak with rhubarb, a minted lobster parfait, springtime shad roe from the Hudson, and Miami stone crabs. The menu was so eclectic, in fact, that it skewed more internationalist than American-panoramic, but it introduced a lot of ideas that, twenty years down the line, would shape the so-called New American cuisine. The restaurant grew its own fresh herbs, had a network of small purveyors who provided ingredients when they were just
à point
(including the famous avant-garde composer John Cage, who brought in the mushrooms he foraged on his upstate property in Rockland County), and featured a large number of American wines on its list.

The Four Seasons was prescient and justly celebrated upon its opening, but curiously uninfluential in terms of spearheading a movement toward a less Frenchified, more Americanized cuisine; it was its own phenomenon, and the French paradigm continued to hold sway. Nevertheless, Beard, now well into his fifties, was growing ever-more influential in other realms of the culinary whirl. In particular, he reveled in being a mentor and talent scout, using his connections to secure work for up-and-comers he felt were worthy, among them the seafood specialist John Clancy, who was installed as chef at Chillingsworth, a Cape Cod restaurant for which Beard was doing consulting,
*
and Paula Wolfert, who needed a new opportunity in the food world when she discovered, upon recovering from her gallbladder attack, that an unsympathetic Dione Lucas wouldn’t take her back. Through a family friend, Wolfert won an audience with Beard at his town-house apartment at 86 West Twelfth Street.

“I go to his house, he’s wearing this puffy shirt like the
Seinfeld
puffy shirt and gold chains and gold bracelets,
*
and he gives me a pack of recipes to make then and there,” she says. The baking expert Paula Peck was coming over for dinner that evening, so Beard put Wolfert to the test immediately. Pleased with her efforts—a very late-fifties, very caloric extravaganza of lobster bisque, chicken Rafael Weill (a San Francisco dish of braised chicken in a cream-sherry sauce, named for a founder of California’s Bohemian Grove camp for wealthy businessmen), and some kind of strawberry-pastry cream dessert—Beard shortly thereafter dispatched Wolfert to the Connecticut home of Mrs. Joshua Logan, wife of the Broadway director, who was throwing a dinner for 150 guests. “He gives me the recipes, she pays me, and he doesn’t take any money for it,” Wolfert says. “I mean, it was insane, I didn’t know how to cook for 150 people, but he told me everything to do.”

BY 1957, THERE WAS
another man besides Beard in the ranks of the food establishment: Craig Claiborne. Claiborne’s ascent, while hardly of supernova proportions, was evidence of how wide-open the food world was to anyone with sufficient industriousness and intelligence.

Armed with his degree from the Swiss hotel school, Claiborne moved, penniless, to New York in 1954. Having worked for a public relations firm in Chicago, Claiborne had an appreciation of how desperate the service sections of newspapers were for story ideas, so, summoning all the moxie he had in him, he placed a call to
New York Times
food editor Jane Nickerson to suggest that she write a story on … him, Craig Claiborne, recent Swiss-hotel-school graduate. Nickerson took the bait, and on May 10, under the headline
GRADUATE OF SWISS HOTEL SCHOOL TELLS OF STUDY OF FRENCH COOKING
, ran Nickerson’s
write-up of the “fresh-faced young man”—the food-world equivalent of a gossip-column puff piece on a promising stage ingenue:

The sense of novelty with which Nickerson described the techniques Claiborne had learned overseas—such as clarifying butter, preparing pasta (a word Nickerson was compelled to define as “macaroni products”), and cooking with white wine (which,
Times
readers learned, imparts a “savory flavor” to meat and fish)—demonstrated how much work Claiborne would have cut out for him when, in a turn of events that no one foresaw, he would succeed Nickerson in 1957.

But that coup was still three years away. The
Times
article, alas, did precisely nothing for Claiborne’s job prospects. So, one Friday that summer, he once again summoned all the moxie he had in him, and strode into
Gourmet’s
offices (which the grand Earle MacAusland had situated in the penthouse of the Plaza Hotel) to request a meeting with Ann Seranne, the editor. Seranne, for some reason, indulged the stranger with a few minutes of her time, listening to his monologue about his hotel-school and journalism degrees. Rather skeptically, she assigned him, on spec, a 3,000-word article on tea.

Early the following Monday, Claiborne, having spent the weekend at the New York Public Library main branch in midtown, reading every old book and article on tea he could find, positioned himself just outside
Gourmet’s
offices. As Seranne strode in, he presented her with his finished story, entitled “Steeped in History.” She admitted to Claiborne that she’d just been trying to get rid of him on Friday, but she took the time to read the article, liked it, bought it, and, in due time, became Claiborne’s sponsor. “Steeped in History,” with Claiborne’s title intact, ran in the January 1955 issue of
Gourmet.

Seranne gave Claiborne more assignments and, after a few months, landed him a low-paying but steady job as a receptionist, researcher, and all-around gofer at the magazine. As his talent became evident, Claiborne was soon given editing responsibilities, such as handling the column published under the name of the esteemed, elderly ex-Ritz-Carlton chef Louis Diat (but actually written by Diat’s assistant, Helen Ridley). But just as Claiborne was beginning to feel that his place at
Gourmet
was secure, Seranne had a falling out with MacAusland and quit the magazine. She persuaded Claiborne to join her at the food-industry public relations firm she was starting, Seranne and Gaden. Around this same time, Seranne introduced Claiborne to Beard. Though too Francophilic and independent-minded to become a full-fledged Beard acolyte à la John Clancy, Claiborne endeared himself to the elder man with his enthusiasm and grace, and, before long, Claiborne was a semi-regular guest and kitchen helper at Beard’s West Twelfth Street dinner parties.

Claiborne soon realized that working for a public relations company proved no more satisfying in New York than it had in Chicago. By 1957, he was restless. Too old to turn once more to the navy for relief, he was saved from vocational limbo by what appeared to be an act of divine providence: one spring day, Seranne’s partner at the firm, Eileen Gaden, announced to the office that Jane Nickerson was moving with her husband and children to Florida and had submitted her resignation to the
Times.
Seranne and Gaden decided then and there to take Nickerson to the 21 Club for a good-bye lunch, and invited Claiborne along. As the ladies gossiped and talked shop, he listened with frustrated longing as Nickerson explained that the
Times
editors had interviewed every lady “who can type with one finger who has ever scrambled an egg,” yet had still not found a successor they deemed worthy. It had not occurred to the management that a man might want the job.

Immediately after the lunch, Claiborne, aflush with white wine and cognac, typed a letter to Nickerson in which he apologized for even bringing up the subject, but, “Do you think that the
Times
might even remotely consider an application from me?” He sent the letter off, but weeks went by
without a response. Finally, while on vacation in Fire Island, unable to relax, Claiborne called Nickerson, who hesitantly acknowledged she’d received the letter and said she’d passed it on to the powers that be. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she advised him. “A man as a food editor …”

But two days later, Claiborne was on a Long Island Rail Road train racing back to the city, having received a call from Nickerson, who’d announced that Betty Howkins, the women’s-page editor, wanted to meet with him. Among the last of the women’s-page dowagers, whose era would soon seem as distant as the Civil War, Howkins greeted Claiborne wearing white gloves and a designer hat, the requisite look of working ladies of her generation. She proved surprisingly receptive to the idea of a male food editor, though she said that only the higher-ups could approve such a hiring.

In this matter, Claiborne’s Southern background turned out to be a boon. The paper’s new assistant managing editor, Clifton Daniel, was a North Carolina–born fop with long, swept-back white hair, a Savile Row wardrobe, and an interest in expanding the paper’s cultural coverage, including the women’s page. (He also happened to be married to Margaret Truman, the daughter of former president Harry Truman.) With Daniel warmly disposed toward the idea of hiring Claiborne, the decision went up to the
Times
managing editor, the man in charge of the whole paper, Turner Catledge. Catledge was one of New York’s professional Southerners, a man who, rather than assimilate, as Claiborne had been trying his level best to do, flaunted his Southernness, exaggerating his honeyed vowels and cultivating an image as a manly exotic in a sea of bland, gray-flannel poindexters. Claiborne was aware that Catledge had attended Mississippi State College, as he had, albeit briefly. So when Catledge asked Claiborne where he’d gone to school, the writer responded “Missippi State”—
Missippi
, as opposed to
Mississippi.
Catledge smiled. Three days later, Claiborne was informed he’d gotten the job.

IN 1979, LOOKING BACK
on more than twenty years of affiliation with the
Times
and the “gastronomic revolution” to which he’d borne witness, Claiborne
wrote, “Before the seeds of the food revolution, there was one dish of foreign inspiration that reigned supreme: curry. It was the one great dish for special occasions.” On that subject, Claiborne was in agreement with Nora Ephron. Ephron made her name in the 1960s as the New Journalism movement’s designated foodie, filing stories for
Esquire
and
New York
magazine that mischievously examined the burgeoning “gourmet” world and its increasing equity as a pop-cultural phenomenon. In a 1968 essay for
New York
, she coined the phrase “The Food Establishment” (it was the essays title), and cast a backward glance at this establishment’s origins in the 1950s, when she was in her teens:

Glib as this summation sounds, “I was totally serious,” says Ephron, who moved on from print journalism to become a novelist, screenwriter, and director whose oeuvre has a conspicuous foodie undercurrent to it (most acutely in
Heartburn
, her roman à clef about the unraveling of her marriage to the reporter Carl Bernstein—which comes with recipes). “Curry opened the door for this gourmet transformation,” she says. “In the late fifties and early sixties, sophisticated cooking became
the
thing to do: you were an adult, and therefore you cooked. And bought Le Creuset pots and good knives. It was just
what you did
—sort of like smoking dope became a few years later.”