A Writer's Life (16 page)

The cook nodded and, after easing himself up, again pulled down on his hat and said good night.

N
ICOLA
S
PAGNOLO SPENT THE BETTER PART OF FIVE YEARS WORKING
at the St. Regis. As he gradually mastered English, having taken lessons at a community center in the Bronx, he found extra work as a waiter or kitchen helper in other restaurants during his off-hours from the hotel. Most of these restaurants were undistinguished places located along the side streets of mid-Manhattan, but sometimes, aided by the fact that he could speak French, he was able to fill in as an assistant waiter at the Pavillon. Nicola would never speak a word of Italian inside the Pavillon, knowing that Henri Soulé did not approve of it any more than he did the Italian custom of cooking with oil instead of butter. All the elite restaurants in New York were French, and Soulé was a Francophile in the extreme. Working at the Pavillon was for Nicola a prideful and humbling experience.

Everything about the restaurant bespoke the best and the most expensive—the glassware was Baccarat, the centerpieces vaunted with long-stemmed roses (three thousand freshly cut roses were inserted every week), and the restaurant's silver serving wagons, exclusively designed in Paris with built-in burners and chafing dishes, and equipped with ball bearings, rolled smoothly along the Pavillon's carpeting and could turn on a dime. Mr. Soulé was constantly in motion between the dining room and kitchen, overseeing the cooking and the serving while being assisted by his cadre of watchful captains and his meticulous and vigilant French chef. The underlings working at the Pavillon knew well that the conditions there were not very conducive to valising.

During this time, Nicola's fourth year since jumping ship, he was having an affair with an adventuresome and impetuous young woman from Texas who worked behind the St. Regis's reservation desk. A year later, in 1960, she encouraged him to revisit Italy. She accompanied him on the trip, and the two of them decided suddenly to get married while visiting his home village, thus accelerating the process by which he would later
gain his American citizenship. But except for the fact that he and his wife were both working at the St. Regis, they discovered soon enough that they had little else in common, and their period of marital cohabitation lasted only a few years and was characteristically tempestuous. Although they would not get around to finalizing their divorce until the late 1960s, Nicola had moved out of their marital apartment in Queens in 1963 and at the same time severed all connections with the St. Regis. This is when he began working with some regularity at Portofino, owned by his Genoese friend Alfredo Viazzi, and it was there that he became acquainted with Elaine Kaufman, and then subsequently joined her uptown after she had started Elaine's.

But after ten years as her headwaiter, the couple began to disagree on so many matters that Nicola decided in 1974 to quit Elaine's and open a restaurant of his own. He quietly revealed this to me late one evening when I was in the restaurant dining alone and Elaine was in the back, having an after-dinner drink with her playwright friend Jack Richardson and a few others playing backgammon.

I was very upset by Nicola's news.

“You
can't
quit,” I said. “This book I'm doing takes place in Elaine's, and you're a main character. You'll both get lots of free publicity when I finish it.”

“I can't take her shit anymore,” he said. He was leaning over my shoulder, speaking directly into my left ear while clearing the table.

“You
can
take it,” I insisted, looking up from my brandy glass, which was half-filled with the green crème de menthe that Elaine had sent over earlier. “You've been sniping at one another every night for ten years. And then you always kiss and make up.”

“We'll see,” he said, walking off with an armload of dishes.

At the time, I was confident that I had convinced him to remain, at least for a few months. By then, I believed, I could finish my research at Elaine's and concentrate on the writing. What I had in mind varied from week to week, but I always saw the presence of Nicola and Elaine as vital to what I thought I was doing, which was to present in book form the panorama of a place that, in addition to being a restaurant, was also a way station for writers escaping the blank pages of overdue books, and a therapy center for unemployed actors allergic to solitude, and a halfway house for husbands between wives, and a rendezvous spot for men and women who, as evening approached, were not sure with whom they wished to dine, or with whom they wished to sleep after they dined, or even if they wished to sleep. It was a restaurant for insomniacs and the indecisive, a late-night talk show without cameras and microphones or commercial
interruptions. Here I saw gangsters, police commissioners, and clergymen ordering dinner at separate tables but on the same night, and here I observed elegantly dressed women walking in with theater programs tucked into their handbags and pausing at the bar while their tuxedoed escorts were being delayed outside by an aggressive pair of panhandlers. I had seen chauffeured moguls making their grand entrances into Elaine's one step ahead of a federal indictment or a skip into Chapter 11, and a porno actress wearing a Laura Ashley dress give a birthday party for her two nieces and their young friends, spending the better part of the evening correcting their table manners. Among the customers at Elaine's had been members of the Beatles, the Black Panthers, the New York Yankees, and Hell's Angels. A young muscleman named Arnold Schwarzenegger came in for dinner one night and presented Elaine with an inscribed copy of the newly published book
Pumping Iron
, in which he was featured. On another occasion, Jackie Gleason walked in, and before joining his friends at a table, he stood behind the bar and entertained the crowd with his famous “Joe the Bartender” routine from his television series. Jazz musicians would stroll in and pound the keys on Elaine's piano, which had a cappuccino machine on top. Elaine's also lured other restaurateurs—Vincent Sardi of Sardi's, Danny Lavezzo of P. J. Clarke's, and Ken Aretsky of the “21” Club—who while eating tried to conceal the fact that their eyes were roving around the room, counting the house.

All these bits and pieces of information were in my notes, along with much more of the same, and sometimes I feared that what I was collecting was too lighthearted and insubstantial for a full-length book—too replete with table-hopping scenes featuring famous people making cameo appearances; it was as if I were interested in adapting my material for a stage review or a musical comedy. I could almost imagine it on Broadway with songs by Stephen Sondheim—
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Elaine's
, starring a hefty actress who could sing and dance as gracefully as the lumpish Zero Mostel while surrounded by a chorus of black-tied waiters kicking up their heels and spinning trays above their heads. At other times, I was satisfied with how my research was going, reminding myself that I was progressing as I had when doing books in the past, sucking up massive amounts of trifling details as indiscriminately as a vacuum cleaner, and then later sorting it all out with care.

However, if Nicola Spagnolo left Elaine's to open his own restaurant, I did foresee procedural problems for my work in progress. I could, of course, present the story entirely from Elaine Kaufman's vantage point, doing a full-length portrait of her and her place in the manner that Joseph Wechsberg had done in his book about Henri Soulé and the Pavillon.
But then my book might turn out to be more Elaine's than mine, more a biography of her as a famous woman than about me as a writer in search of a story set in the world of a restaurant, the only place where I had witnessed my father being happy.

When Nicola went ahead and quit Elaine's two nights after our talk, infuriating Elaine and making news in the tabloids, I resigned myself to putting the project away for a while, delegating it to the back of my filing cabinet. With the exit of Nicola from my location site, I had lost one of the pair of clashing, colorful characters that I had been counting upon to lend a perception of stability to what was still forming in my mind. I had likened the presence of Elaine and Nicola to two poles supporting my tent show, two ringmasters around whom my rotating cast of characters could revolve, two alter egos through whom I might reflect my views as an outsider in both the mainstream of America and the Italy of my ancestry.

Elaine was a contemporary of mine, the only smart Jewish woman I'd ever met who had an affinity for Italian men. We were both newcomers to Manhattan at the same time, and, though we did not meet until she started Elaine's, we lived a block apart during the mid-1950s in Greenwich Village, hung out in many of the same sawdust-floored bars, attended many of the same poetry readings, listened to the same music on the jukebox, and, remaining residents of the city for the rest of our lives, we similarly appreciated and responded to what E. B. White called “the vibrations of great times and tall deeds.”

Nicola Spagnolo was my Italian insider in the restaurant trade, my “down-and-out” Orwellian wanderer whose fugitive lifestyle fascinated me and that as a writer I intended to emulate vicariously. Nicola and I had established a sense of familiarity and kinship shortly after we had first met at Elaine's, and I think this was reinforced by the fact that we strongly resembled each other physically. The regulars at Elaine's often mentioned this, asking if we two were related. Our features and profiles were strikingly similar, both of us having large brown eyes and Roman noses and chiseled cheekbones that gave us, in repose, the brooding, pensive expression often projected in the posed photos of matadors. Our dark hair was graying at the temples in the same place and was thinning equally at the crown as we entered our forties; and in the ten years that followed at Elaine's, neither of us had noticeably gained weight. He commented admiringly on the suits I wore into the restaurant, the tailoring done by my father or my Italian cousin in Paris, and since Nicola was my size, he often reminded me that if I should die before him, he would like to inherit my wardrobe.

Within weeks of his departure from Elaine's, I was on a plane to California to resume my work on what was to become
Thy Neighbors Wife
. But during my regular visits to New York, I continued to see Elaine Kaufman (her new headwaiter was another Italian she had known from her Village days at Portofino, Elio Guaitolini), and I also remained in contact with Nicola Spagnolo, whose restaurant—Nicola's, at 146 East 84th Street—Elaine found irritatingly close to her own place north of Eighty-eighth, and she also alleged, through her attorney, that Nicola was trying to steal her customers.

Fortunately for him, and a main factor in his successful defense, was the lack of any evidence that he had made overtures to her patrons; he had not mailed them circulars, nor made phone calls, nor otherwise informed them that he was opening a place of his own. What he did do, however, though it was difficult to criminalize, was decorate the walls of Nicola's with framed photographs depicting several of the authors and cultural figures he had met at Elaine's, and like moths to bright light, many of these people were drawn to him, but never in such numbers on any given evening, nor with any consistency in the following months or years, that would threaten the continuing popularity and prosperity of Elaine Kaufman's business. Whatever trade she lost, she replaced with other customers to whom she offered front tables and gratuitous cordials, and, moreover, it was soon clear that the two restaurants functioned differently and were not dependent on the same type of loyal patronage.

Elaine Kaufman's restaurant remained as it had always been—a latenight informal place that reflected the personality of its magisterial mistress. She was the Night Mother, the nurturer of the psychological and dining needs of the Quality Lit set and their accompanying poseurs. Since she enjoyed puffing on cigarettes, her own and other people's, smoking was allowed at the front tables of Elaine's, including cigars; anyone who objected was sent to one of the tables closer to the back, or to an adjacent room that was usually reserved for private parties and was referred to as “Siberia.”

Nicola Spagnolo's place, on the other hand, posted
NO SMOKING
signs and was patronized by a relatively early-to-bed group of achieving people who, more than at Elaine's, were representative of Wall Street, television networks, advertising agencies, fashion magazines, cosmetic surgery, and—until they became the targets of environmentalists and animal activists roaming the sidewalks armed with spray cans—the city's leading furriers and their runway models. Writers were treated as cordially and respectfully by Nicola as they were at Elaine's, but since neither he nor his
waiters were regular readers of anything more high-toned than the
Daily Racing Form
and the local tabloids, there was a limit to his ability to enlarge upon his circle of literary customers.

Nicola's career as a proprietor was financially profitable from the start, and he was also now married for a second time and the father of a young son. He had met his second wife, a petite hazel-eyed blonde named Linda, during the early 1960s, when she and her fellow employees from an investment banking firm frequently dined at Portofino. Following his divorce from the Texan, Nicola married Linda in 1968, and after their son was born, she willingly left her job in order to have more time for their home life as well as assisting her husband with the financial management of Nicola's and the outside investments he was making with his share of the profits. The couple occupied a comfortable apartment in a modern high rise on a well-maintained street a few blocks east of the restaurant. As a result of their continuing good fortune throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, their son grew up in circumstances similar to those of the other privileged children of the neighborhood. As a toddler, he had been doted upon by doormen. During his adolescence, he attended private schools on Manhattan's Upper East Side. After his father had purchased a home near Palm Beach, close to those occupied by some of the entrepreneurs and executives who regularly patronized Nicola's, the boy would become accustomed to winter vacations in the sun.