Insatiable (17 page)

22

T
HE
Y
O
-Y
O
U
NWINDS

W
E DID NOT HAVE LUNCH IN THE TIVOLI GARDENS. I DID NOT GO TO
Copenhagen. I did not get to Sweden. Those ten days in Italy with Don was our life in a microcosm—half the time, we were lovingly in delighted cahoots, half the time we were snapping and ripping each other apart. He was exhilarated by the week spent editing the drug series in Nice. He knew it was good. (Though he didn’t know it would win a Pulitzer for
Newsday,
for himself, and for the investigative team.) Don loved being an editor. He loved newspapers. That positive energy brightened our time together at first.

In Milan, Signor Buccellati himself and a saleswoman pulled out brooches, rings, a string of pale gray pearls in the jewel-box shop of the great Italian jewelry family. I slipped a wide gold cuff on my wrist. It was a leaf with a raised stem in the middle, etched all over with the finest lines, in the classic Buccellati style, just $330. I had to have it. Don grinned with pleasure and hugged me. I’d made a decision. I had found a bracelet I loved and I didn’t make a big deal about the price. I put it on immediately.

A disappointing meal at a classic favorite of Milan in the Galleria brought us down. A couple of wonderfully al dente pastas at lunch brought us up. I insisted we walk a mile on tiny backstreets to find an antiques dealer who no one had heard of, and he dented the car trying to park. What did we fight about? I can’t remember. Perhaps it was my pitiful Italian. I could ask directions but I didn’t always understand the answer. We were lost in a net of one-way streets. He expected me to know everything. He slammed out of the car and walked away, leaving it in the middle of a narrow street. I pounded my fist on the windshield.

He came running back, grabbed my hand, and kissed it. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Look, your sweet little hand is hurt.”

We drove into Turin, both of us sulking for some reason I cannot remember, except that nothing was working, not even pasta. It was gray. We were gray. By that time, all the hope I’d never stopped clinging to had vanished. Holding the map upside down in a vain effort to figure out what direction we were going, I said left when I meant right. He screamed at me. He said every terrible thing he could think of. That he hated me. That he loved Her. That it was no fun to be with someone who knew everything. That the joy for him was showing the world to someone who didn’t know anything. I did not answer. I did not look at him as we finally checked into the hotel.

I would leave, I was telling myself. My mind was racing. I would find Burt in Scandinavia. Let Don stew in Turin. Let him find his way back to Milan, to the airport, to New York. I sat on the bed, leafing through a folder, looking for Burt’s itinerary. I sat there staring at the phone number, staring at the phone.

Don doesn’t speak Italian, I told myself. How will Don manage to get back to Milan without me? He lay beside me in the bed, facing the wall, weeping. “It’s over, isn’t it?” he said.

“We’ll go home,” I replied.

We went back to our three therapists—his, mine, and ours—but we both knew now we were just seeking the strength to say good-bye.

Burt Reynolds didn’t like the piece I wrote for
Cosmopolitan.
Why would he? In it, I had scolded him for trying to be both a serious actor and a cheap pinup. He didn’t take my calls. I never saw him again.

“Why were you so tough on him?” my therapist asked years later. “You didn’t treat him as a serious person.”

“But what I wrote was true,” I protested. “I am a journalist, you know. He had just made
Deliverance
. He’d shown he could act. And he was sending fans photos of himself half-naked.”

“So that was your fine journalistic integrity?” she asked. “You could be living with Burt Reynolds.”

“Oh Mildred,” I said.

“You didn’t need to tell the truth,” she said. “Not if you cared for him. It was not the
Times,
after all. It was only
Cosmopolitan.
”

23

I
T’S
N
OT
N
ICE TO
F
OOL
M
OTHER
K
AUFMAN

O
F COURSE I LONGED ONE DAY TO BELONG TO NEW YORK’S LITERACRACY
. But being an eater, later a dancer, and not much of a drinker or lounge lizard, I came to Elaine’s literary nursery late. An unabashedly seedy neighborhood bar at 1703 Second Avenue, near Eighty-eighth Street, it was simply not on my radar in the sixties, when I marched along, blinded by the fog of my Francophilia. At some point in 1963, the door of this simple saloon had yawned open and Nelson Aldrich, then a teacher, later an editor at
Harper’s,
wandered in and lingered. Next night, he brought a poet friend. A drift of lean Off-Broadway playwrights settled in. A nonstop poker game evolved. And Elaine, the young earth mother, nursed them along, loving nanny, trading gossip, taking confessions. By the seventies, life was sheer gold for Elaine.

She had already evolved into her complex character (Mother Goose, tempestuous Madame Defarge) by the time I first documented the literary lemming crawl—“It Must Be Calf’s Foot Jelly, Because Cannelloni Don’t Shake Like That”—for
New York
in 1971. When
Women’s Wear
found the Elaine’s mix compellingly chic, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, poseurs, and wannabes were forced to notice. It was that defining moment when journalists and writers came to be seen as sexy, Manhattan’s rock stars.

The playpen of the quality media quickly became an obligatory scene. “The Beautiful people clotted there, light bouncing off perfect capped smiles, making midnight Second Avenue bright as noon,” I wrote. Limos double-parked in the grimy no-man’s-land, spilling superstars—Mastroianni, Clint Eastwood, John Lennon, even Jackie. Lynda Bird with George Hamilton and her Secret Service shadow demanded a prime table, I reported. Elaine stood them at the jukebox.

“Inevitably came the third-string royalty, and the second-string rich, the politicans and flacks, the sycophants, the voyeurs, the grubs and slugs and drones, the curious, you and me,” I reported. “Blueblood dandies and Dun-and-Bradstreet-adored dudes screamed for see-and-be-seen tables but Elaine kept them iced at the bar—a gorgon, guarding those sexy front stations for her ‘boys,’ the ink-stained regulars.”

You didn’t need to call your broker, your bookie, or your divorce lawyer to find out how much you were worth. “One had only to stand at Elaine’s bar with a watch, timing the wait for a table, smiling big as if the telltale drag on the minute hand weren’t all that painful. As if a wave to the back room wasn’t really fatal,” I wrote. The front-row flaneurs were thrilled the night Elaine kept Henry Ford and his dazzling Christina cooling at the bar, then exiled them to the Ragu Room, her Siberia. “She’s just a middle-class Italian,” I quoted Elaine.

Divorces were doubly cruel. Who would get custody of Elaine’s? In a moment of mock tragedy after splitting with Dan Greenburg (“How to Be a Jewish Mother”), Nora Ephron dared to voice the unthinkable. “Do you think Dan gets Elaine’s in the separation agreement?”

People came expecting a floor show. Jason Robards weaving on his chair, denouncing a reporter for writing that he was known to take a drink now and then. Richard Harris lunging at a total stranger in the bar. “People go hoping to see Robert Frost in his cups or Solzhenitsyn decking Kurt Vonnegut or Norman Mailer in a violent Maileresque moment,” I quoted David Halberstam as saying. But the truth was that Elaine’s special pets were not all that recognizable. A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway’s biographer, was an insider’s icon. I certainly could not have picked Bruce Jay Friedman (
A Mother’s Kisses
) out of the scrimmage or Mario Puzo before
The Godfather.
Even Elaine didn’t recognize Antonioni. Exiled him out back. Mike Royko was a big deal in Chicago, but how would Elaine know? Royko needed to come back with Jimmy Breslin, Jules Feiffer, and Mayor Lindsay to rate a perch where he could handicap the crowd.

There weren’t all that many front-row tables along the wall to jockey. Protecting the big “training table” for her boys, bouncing drunks, and shouting down sassers was a full-time job. In fact, it was another variation on the sadistic tables games French restaurateurs played in those days. When Gay and Nan Talese walked in late one night with the actress Teresa Wright, Elaine went up to the two Englishmen she had seated after an interminable wait. “It’s been such an awful night for you, you won’t be surprised if I move you to another table,” she said, shuffling them off toward the rear.

“I would never run a joint that way,” said Danny Lavezzo, who ran P. J. Clarke’s, often in absentia. “People aren’t even hungry. They just come in to find out how they rate. It runs you jagged.”

Jagged, Elaine would rip up checks. “Out. Out. Get the creep out,” she would say, exiling some real or imagined offender. When a waiter took pity on the actress Cloris Leachman standing famished at the bar during an extended wait and brought her a piece of bread, Elaine screamed insults too primitive to print in
New York
magazine. Leachman didn’t move. When Suni Agnelli’s kids wanted Cat Stevens’s autograph, Elaine closed in, snapping, “I won’t have my customers annoyed.” When Ben Gazzara left a ten-dollar tip on a one-hundred-dollar check, Elaine screamed, “How dare you stiff my waiters?” One by one, Gazzara’s drinking companions—Pete Hamill, Nick Pileggi, John Scanlan—got up, slipped behind Elaine, and disassociated themselves from Gazzara’s gaffe. “Her strength is everyone’s fear of the irrational mother,” theorized my
New York
colleague Anthony Haden-Guest.

But when Elaine aimed her ire at
Women’s
Wear
editor in chief Michael Cody, he took his vengeance. Elaine’s ceased to exist in the gossipy “Eye” column of
Women’s Wear
. That was the summer of 1975. I tagged along with friends who loved Elaine’s—there to document the fallout. “Unless Patty Hearst is captured playing croquet on the White House Lawn or Golda Meir is trapped having breakfast in bed (bacon and eggs in a pita) with Anwar Sadat in a hot sheet motel on the Gaza Strip, it looks as if the summer of ’75 may come to be known for the Great Saloon War,” I wrote.

It was an argument over money that provoked Elaine’s majordomo and silent partner, Nick Spagnolo, to break away, moving into Nicola’s at what had been the Foresters Rendezvous at 146 East 84th, taking along her third chef, a waiter or two, a dishwasher, the name of her baker, and the formula for her squid salad.
Women’s Wear
—with a constituency the size of Ruritania, it somehow wielded the power of an H-bomb in those days—proclaimed Nicola’s the best “joint” in town, hailing it for “fast becoming the IN place to go.” Thus began the tug-of-war between literary Manhattan’s wet nurse and her right-hand man for the hearts and minds, floating bar tabs, and heartburn of Elaine faithfuls: the loitering literati, the filmflam, the commuting celebs and their heaps of Uriahs, the masochists, the gofers and hangers-on.

Irwin Shaw, Chanel mannequin-turned-designer Jackie Rogers, Lily and Douglas Auchincloss, Arthur Miller, Robert Altman, Larry King—
WWD
gave the roll call. Soon the scrubbed little rich kids and Bloomingdale’s overreachers were standing summer pink and beautiful at the bar as Nick fussed over defectors from Elaine’s: Rita Gam, Jules Feiffer, Nora Ephron and her husband-to-be, Carl Bernstein.

As if those betrayals weren’t cruel enough, it was Gay Talese, Elaine’s very special darling, who couldn’t help observing to David Halberstam, as I reported, “The food is really better here.”

Halberstam, choking slightly, pointed to a potted palm: “Shhhh. She may have the place wired.”

Elaine’s pets were pinned wiggling in the spotlight, as Suzy, the Ernie Pyle of frontline hometown war correspondents, filled her
Daily News
column with names. Dare one brave a veal chop at Nick’s for fear of exile from Elaine’s? Soon there were faint tracks in the sidewalk from Elaine’s flock skulking, swaggering between the two fueling stands. Spaghetti carbonara at Nick’s. Nightcaps at Elaine’s. Beef paillard at Elaine’s. Then Nick’s till a boozy 2:00
AM.
Everyone wanted a decent beef paillard and Elaine’s devotion, too. Did Elaine know? Would she explode? Should one . . . confess? The journalistic titans of our time cowered and burped.

Certain passionate Elaineastes refused to cross Nick’s threshold. But a lot of the old true blues quite frankly liked Nick, too. “Elaine gave us a sense of community and Nick was part of that feeling,” I quoted Halberstam. He hesitated, pondering the boundaries of loyalty, remembering that Elaine herself had narrowed the turf during the bitterest moments of the
Harper’s Magazine
rebellion “when she seated that miserable son-of-a-bitch Lewis Lapham at the very next table.”

“Elaine’s is our club, but Nick’s is a restaurant,” saloon commuters cried. “Nick’s veal is spectacular,” one assured me. “His salad is fifty times better,” reported another. “I have been watching Elaine’s veal chop,” reported one of America’s most lauded investigative journalists. “It’s getting smaller.” Men of courage, women of conviction, brave journalists who had boldly taken on the president, the Pentagon, the Mafia,
New York Post
publisher Dorothy Schiff, and assorted other great American institutions, begged not to be quoted by name.

Now Nick’s was all booked, unless he happened to know you. Friends of the house got seated fast. Strangers held up the bar, eyes darting in paranoia as they watched socialite (later publisher) Carter Burden rushed to a vacant table. They screamed. Nick screamed back: “Go. Don’t wait. I told you it might be two hours.” He stalked away.

Had he not learned about the restaurant business at Elaine’s elbow? Nick had the Walter Cronkites, Muriel Resnik (
Any Wednesday
), Lee Radziwill, even Elaine’s very special darling, playwright Jack Richardson. And film director Frank Perry with writer/editor Barbara Goldsmith. Elaine had Kurt Vonnegut and his wife, photographer Jill Krementz, the Schuyler Chapins, Frankie Fitzgerald, and David Halberstam two nights in a row (with Burt Glinn Tuesday, with Tammy Grimes on Wednesday). Elaine had society’s design duo, Mica Ertegun and Chessy Raynor. And Suzy, breathlessly reporting the heroes and casualties of the nightly skirmish.

One night, Elaine bounced two guys and was moving back to her check-toting station at the bar, when one of them sneaked back in and kicked her in the derriere. Was it an act of isolated boldness? Was it the beginning of the end?

“Does the cosmic angst of this saloon ado escape you?” I asked my readers. “If your adrenaline is unspiked by minor masochism, if you’re not susceptible to narcissistic mortification, if you have never quite understood the need to escape from your wife, the seven drinks before supper, the fear of closing your eyes, the terror of intimacy, the horror of being alone, then it is difficult to explain the spiritual imperative of a refuge like Elaine’s.” “How amusing,” writer Michael Mooney mused (fortified by seeing the cover of his new book on the wall at both Nicola’s and Elaine’s. “That Elaine Kaufman should be the Madame de Maintenon of the age.”

Despite assorted seismic fissures now and then over the years, Elaine is still there in her saloon every night, bigger than life. She never really looked young, so she doesn’t look old. Three decades later, she indulges the survivors, mothering a new generation of press punksters and boldface parentheses, hosting their book parties and exclusive opening-night after parties, their new DVDs and Grammys, and now and then she’ll open in the afternoon for a wake, where we look around to see who’s alive, who’s a blonde now, who’s had a face-lift, who’s still eating out on somebody else’s check. It’s power beyond chic, beyond fashion, beyond generational divide. Mama knows.

As for Nick, well, Nicola’s is still there, but I can’t recall the last time anyone spoke of it.