A Writer's Life (62 page)

Whatever misunderstandings Jackie Ho would later have in New York with Mel were easily resolved, Winter Evans told me, as long as Jackie had her way. Evans recalled that after Jackie had torn up Mel's money and had thrown it into his face, Mel had soon returned to the apartment with another envelope, this filled with enough cash to satisfy Jackie's expectations that her visit to Hong Kong should be budgeted at no less than twenty thousand dollars. Evans would sometimes accompany Jackie overseas, especially when the purpose of the trip was to ski, which they both enjoyed and at which Jackie excelled, even though she had never seen snow until she had turned eighteen and had taken her first skiing lesson during a weekend in Sapporo, Japan.

Evans would continue to be Jackie's skiing partner, confidant, and consort long after she had eased Mel out of her life, which she did by 1973. “He'd become a waste of makeup” was how she had put it to Evans, using
a phrase that she often used when explaining her change of heart toward certain men who had formerly seemed to matter to her. Jackie was meticulous in making herself up before going out at night, Evans explained to me. She scrutinized herself in front of her bedroom mirror as she carefully applied her cosmetics, and adjusted her hair, and tried on her jewelry (much of it designed by Bulgari, although some had come from her grandmother). Jackie's body, too, was a reflection of her dedication to physical health, her working out daily in a gym, Evans went on to say, emphasizing that her well-toned and slender figure had changed little during the nearly thirty years he had known her. Many men had since come and gone, but Evans had remained a constant factor in her life, her oldest American friend; after she had divorced him in order to marry J. Z. Morris in 1979, he had served as the couple's best man. When J.Z. moved his things into Jackie's penthouse, taking over Evans's closet space, Evans moved
his
things into what had been J.Z.'s pied-à-terre on the fifth floor of the building at 206 East 63rd Street.

But even though I had been recommended to Jackie by Winter Evans and J. Z. Morris, she resisted my interview requests throughout 1997 and into 1998, saying always that she was too busy to see me, while at the same time saying it was okay to call her. She was friendly on the telephone but otherwise elusive. I wondered if she saw me for what I was, a man whose interest in her she could put to no practical purpose, and I was therefore a waste of makeup. Or maybe, as I recalled what Evans had said about her, she saw me as a potential player in her “cat-and-mouse game.” However, I remained interested in her as an audacious woman of no doubt beguiling charm who might loom large in my projected book about the Willy Loman Building; and I was surprised and encouraged one afternoon when she returned a message of mine and agreed to meet with me. “I'm leaving for Hawaii tomorrow,” she said, “but I'll be back in a month or so. Call me back then and we'll make a date.”

I had meanwhile followed my editor's advice and put aside the restaurant saga, conceding to myself that it was probably wise to do so. I had been unable to get a handle on the material after years of research. I could never understand
why
206 East 63rd was the worst address in the
Zagat
guide and why it symbolized failure within the restaurant industry. I knew only that whoever opened a restaurant at 206 East 63rd was likely to have a dyspeptic experience. Still, I occasionally stopped in to have dinner.

The investors from Fort Lee, New Jersey, who had bought Tucci from Gerald Padian and his associates in March 1997, decided to keep the restaurant's name, while repainting it in brighter colors. The exterior walls, which had been green, were redone in a salmon tone similar to that
of the much-praised Sign of the Dove restaurant located a few blocks uptown, and they replaced Padian's green canvas marquee with a red one. In the dining room they installed an elaborate new backbar, and also a new rug for the staircase, and white linen cloths now covered the black marble-topped tables that Padian had left uncovered. Extra personnel were added to the service staff, and the food prices were increased. The chef that Padian had hired, Matt Hereford, was retained, although the chief cook, Miguel Peguero, quit to accept a higher-paying job at a New York social club where Padian was a member.

The general manager brought in by the New Jersey backers was a high-spirited though prickly individual named Larry Rosenberg. In his mid-forties and a native of Brooklyn, Rosenberg was slight of build, dark-haired, and mustachioed, and he was quite distinct in his manner of dressing, possessing a wardrobe that consisted of several Nehru-style jackets of varying shades, which he hung on a pipe in the basement at Tucci and alternatively wore while greeting customers upstairs for lunch and dinner. Though trained as a pastry chef, Rosenberg had risen to management positions in a number of restaurants before coming to Tucci, and he took pride in the fact that there was no task in the trade that he could not satisfactorily perform—he could cook, tend bar, wait tables, and supervise a staff. “In a pinch, I can do anybody's job,” he told me one night after my second meal there, “and so I don't have to take any funny stuff from these people who work for me.”

Disliking what he interpreted to be a cavalier attitude on the part of Andy Globus, one of the holdover waiters from Padian's time, Rosenberg fired him within three weeks. During his first six months as Tucci's manager, Rosenberg dismissed half a dozen other employees as well, including the waiter from Russia, Konstantin Avramov. Rosenberg had learned from a busboy that Konstantin had been overheard talking in the kitchen about the likelihood that he would soon open a place of his own, whereupon he would offer superior positions to several of his friends among the Tucci staff. Konstantin denied these allegations as soon as Rosenberg had brought them up, but Rosenberg fired him anyway. Konstantin was eventually hired as a waiter at the Coco Marina restaurant in the World Financial Center. Five months after Rosenberg had fired him, Rosenberg himself was looking for a job.

The New Jersey backers, unimpressed with the return they were receiving on their investment, decided to close Tucci in the spring of 1998, a little more than a year after they had bought it from Padian's group. The final dinner would be served on Sunday night, April 5. I was among the closing-night crowd.

As I sat at a corner table behind the bar, sipping a predinner drink in the company of my wife and two of our friends, I could not help (despite being privy to the many unfavorable comments made about Larry Rosenberg by Konstantin Avramov et al.) feeling sorry for Rosenberg as I watched him standing stiffly at the door, dressed in his navy blue Nehru jacket, evoking the image of a dutiful and dour sea captain posed on the deck of a sinking ship. His dark eyes were downcast and he spoke softly and succinctly as he acknowledged the arriving customers, seeming to be more disappointed than pleased by their abundant number—no fewer than 170 diners, which was unusually high for a Sunday night, and it would produce at the end of the evening revenue of $6,430. And
yet
, as Rosenberg later complained to me, not one of the restaurant's backers from New Jersey had made an appearance during the restaurant's last night to say farewell to him or to the workers, who, in most instances, had shown up to fulfill their obligations on the eve of their unemployment.

“Oh, part of me is relieved that we're getting out of here,” Rosenberg told me, pausing briefly after delivering the menus, “and yet there's another part of me that really wished we'd made it.” But one of the mistakes that he acknowledged making a week earlier was in forewarning two of his favorite waiters that Sunday would be Tucci's last night. “And how did you think they thanked me?” Rosenberg asked, and then quickly answered: “They thanked me by abandoning me. They disappeared. And so I've been shorthanded since then, and tonight we have all this business, and I have to help the waiters and busboys and also be at the door.” While I nodded with understanding, it was obvious that many customers were intolerant of the slow service they were receiving, and they complained often to Rosenberg, calling to him from across the room:

“Where's the waiter?”

“What's the problem here?”

“Where's our food?”

“What's taking so long?”

“Everything's coming along,” said Rosenberg, trying to reassure them as he moved up and down the aisles, helping his waiters and busboys; “everything's on the way.”

“Well, if you don't get it here in a minute,” said one customer with three companions, “we're out of here.”

Rosenberg's conciliatory manner suddenly changed. His dark eyes narrowed, and he walked toward the man.

“Well, why don't you leave
now?”
he asked, with his upraised right hand pointing toward the door.

“We
will,”
the man said immediately, getting up and heading toward the exit, with his companions following.

As Rosenberg watched them leave, I removed a pen from my pocket and noted on a piece of paper what I had just seen. Rosenberg turned toward me.

“You looking for a quote?” he asked.

Before I could reply, he struck a theatrical pose. He placed his hands on his hips, tossed his head back, and, dancing in the aisle, began to mimic the song that Al Jolson had made famous in the 1920s film
The Jazz Singer
—“Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye.” He serenaded the restaurant crowd with:

I
N THE LATE SUMMER OF 1998
,
FOUR MONTHS AFTER
L
ARRY
R
OSENBERG
had closed Tucci, Donald Trump's estranged wife, Marla Maples, in partnership with Bobby Ochs, a restaurateur who was a friend of hers, announced that they would soon open a restaurant at 206 East 63rd Street called Peaches. This would be the tenth partnership seeking success at this address. The new restaurant was named Peaches because Marla Maples had been born in the Peach State of Georgia. When I first heard the news, having received a fax from J. Z. Morris's office in Sarasota, I tried to pay no attention. I was finished with the restaurant story. I had eaten my last meal at that losers' location.

In holding Morris's message, however, I was drawn to the surname of Ms. Maples's partner—
Ochs
. Was Bobby Ochs related to the Ochs family that owned the
New York Times?
If so, should this not command my interest? How extraordinary it would be, I thought, if Bobby Ochs was a blood relative of the newspaper's late patriarch, Adolph Ochs, who had left his assets to his offspring, hoping that they would emulate him at the helm of the
Times
—and yet there was perhaps a black sheep among them who, after discrediting himself, had been ostracized by his kinsmen and was destined to grovel for his livelihood in the pits of the dining profession at 206 East 63rd Street.

But what if Bobby Ochs and his forthcoming Peaches would emerge as a critical and commercial success? Would this not earn Bobby Ochs a prodigal son's return to the bosom of the
Times
-owning family?

Aware that it is easier to track down restaurateurs
before
they become important or self-important, I hastened over to 206 East 63rd Street. I had no idea what Ochs might look like, but Marla Maples would be easily recognizable because her photograph had often appeared in the press in connection with her career as an actress and model and, of course, her marriage to the real estate king, Donald Trump, which was currently in its third and final year. However, when I arrived at the restaurant site early
in the afternoon, a few days before the scheduled opening of Peaches, I saw no sign of the blond-haired southern belle; I saw only two painters retouching the lower ledge of the building's facade in a honey-colored shade and a workman standing on a ladder under the marquee, tightening a peach-striped canvas awning. The security man posted behind the front door told me that Ms. Maples was out of town and Ochs was out to lunch, but after I had shown him the fax from J. Z. Morris and had further identified myself, he permitted me to enter the restaurant and look around.

I was immediately impressed by the many changes and improvements that had occurred since the closing of Tucci, and it was obvious that lots of money had been spent on the new decor—a sum that I would later learn was in excess of $750,000. Indeed, the place was now so altered in appearance that it was difficult for me to associate it with its troubled past, and not since the opening of Le Premier in 1977 did I feel as optimistic about the future prospects of the proprietors at this address. Everything here was of the highest quality and design, luxuriously appointed and carefully painted—none of the slapdash brushstrokes and plaster cracks that had marked the walls and wainscoting of Tucci. The secondhand bar that Gerald Padian had bought from a warehouse in Harlem had been scrapped. On the second floor was a glistening new mahogany bar that was twice as long as Padian's bar. A grand piano stood next to it. This would be part of the locale of the one-hundred-seat supper club and cabaret at Peaches. The seven-foot-high brick pizza oven that had been erected in the rear of the dining room below by the Napa Valley Grill owner, Michael Toporek, had been discarded for a U-shaped banquette uphostered in a beige print fabric. The dining room's walls were cream-colored; there were potted palms standing on pedestals along the edges of the room; and hanging from the ceiling were round honey-colored glass fixtures with copper rims. The tables were larger and more widely spaced than they had been at Tucci, although the seating capacity of ninety at Peaches would exceed Tucci's by fifteen.

“Hello, I'm Bobby Ochs,” said the man who approached me from behind, and as I turned, I saw a slender six-footer in his mid-fifties with horn-rimmed glasses, dark eyes, graying curly hair, and a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. Personable to a fault, and with little prompting from me, he proceeded to describe in detail what I had observed in passing, and while he credited Marla Maples with making most of the key decisions with regard to the ambience of Peaches, he also mentioned that she had been assisted by two women who were feng shui consultants.