Insatiable (18 page)

24

N
OBODY
K
NOWS THE
T
RUFFLES
I
’VE
S
EEN

P
RESS JUNKETS AND FREE MEALS WERE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO NEW YORK
magazine critics and contributing editors. But there was no way I could refuse the totally elegant hustle Yanou called to propose. Ten of America’s greatest writers would be invited to the grand
bouffe
of all
bouffes,
choreographed to show off one of her clients, La Grande Cuisine Française, a new collective of France’s star toques. The Young Turks, as they had been dubbed by Raymond Sokolow, Claiborne’s replacement at the
Times,
would soon become the shock troops of something called the nouvelle cuisine. We would crisscross France’s gourmand plains at harvest time in the two company jets of our hosts, Moët & Chandon.

It was 1973, the year of Watergate revelations, and heavy U.S. air strikes in Cambodia. Nixon’s secret tapings were no longer a secret and all my friends wanted to be on his enemies list. Editorial writers were in a snit because France had ignored worldwide protests and exploded a nuclear device in the South Pacific. But serious eaters are notorious for not nursing grudges. And I could not imagine a richer way to do the gourmand truffle hop than among Yanou’s chosen flock. I also saw the excursion as a chance to escape from the gloom at home, where Don was either melancholy and clingy or melancholy and distant, and where my mother tried not to sound teary on the phone when she spoke of my sister, whose cancer had started to eat away at her bones.

Yanou told me she’d already invited Tom Wolfe and wanted to know whom else to ask. I gave her a wish list of the literary giants I’d most love to break bread with: Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Philip Roth, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal. I got goose bumps just thinking of the wit that would flow with our Dom Pérignon.

To protect my journalistic integrity, Clay Felker agreed that I should pay for the transatlantic flight and my hotel rooms. Yanou promised to ask each chef to give me a bill. Most of them understood the magazine’s rules, but a few just laughed. Pierre Laporte in Biarritz returned my check for thirty dollars with the amount crossed off and “thirty kisses” written in its place. The bills were a pitiful sham, to be quite honest. I would have had to mortgage our little church on the hill in Woodstock to pay for the private-jet hops and the avalanche of champagne, but expensing the magazine for what added up to a pittance made me feel less of a freeloader.

Why was I not shocked to learn that my nominees for a winged salon of great writers were otherwise occupied? Still I assumed similar greats had been gracefully substituted by Yanou. I was taken aback, on boarding the plane, to spy Al Goldstein, editor of the tawdry sex journal
Screw,
sipping champagne as if severely parched. “I’m not supposed to mention
Screw
on this trip,” he confided, noting that he was a recent graduate of the Four Seasons wine course, serious bona fides for this excursion. As his last act on earth, he had sent a copy of our itinerary to his Weight Watchers group leader. “I’m probably fourteenth choice,” Al said, brooding. “I’m probably a stand-in for Mailer. I’m Jewish. I’m from Brooklyn. Actually, though, I’ve never stabbed any of my wives.” Not that he couldn’t have, since he was carrying saccharin in an ejector pen.

Nora Ephron had come directly from covering “The battle of the sexes” in Houston, where tennis power Billy Jean King had routed Bobby Riggs in straight sets.
New York
magazine regular Jane O’Reilly was ostensibly aboard, eating for
Ms.,
Gloria Steinem’s brand-new publication, which had yet to recognize the importance of anything as frivolous as food or wine. There was a very junior editor from
House Beautiful;
a bourbon-loving science expert, who was writing a book on why infinity isn’t; photographer Dan Wynn (the favorite food photographer of
New York
then), and Bob Guccione’s sister, who had a pretty serious Coke habit. At least
New York
’s wine writer, Alex Bespaloff, had serious credentials. Yanou informed us that a British wine journalist and Danny Kaye (“because he is so crazy about cooking”) would join our coven in Paris. To a generation that might only know the great comic artist from movies on late-night television, where he appeared as Hans Christian Andersen, I should note that Danny was a certified foodie, celebrated for his fine Chinese cooking. He kept three helpers slicing and chopping for his star-studded dinner parties in his professionally equipped eat-in kitchen in Beverly Hills. There, he presided over a giant wok with flamboyant gestures, as if he were conducting a symphony.

“This is like a ship of fools,” Goldstein observed, bright-eyed and eager. “No one is with his mate. Do you realize what potential there is for lust?”

I suggested he sublimate his lust and concentrate on this glorious exercise in gluttony—advice I was actually giving myself. All over France, the great chefs had been hoarding the fattest duck livers for us. Awash in a torrent of bubbly, we would jet from foie to foie, collapse on silken sheets in luxury hotel rooms, fighting the cholesterol rush, absently nibbling exquisite chocolates. Never quite sober on our seven-day mission, we groaned as the small corporate jet’s fridge was opened to reveal fresh bottles of Moët every morning before lunch . . . and drank it anyway. Each night, another Michelin-laureled chef would have us at his mercy. From the sound of the plans, I felt I would need a wheelbarrow to transport my own liver back home.

Bleary from jet lag that first morning, we were cheered on by Yanou with an oyster and champagne breakfast at Le Duc, a seafood spot run by the Minchelli brothers, whom Yanou was grooming for stardom. The panache of sea creatures was stunning, like nothing I’d seen before: giant Belons and sharply briny oysters from the Ile de Re. Crackling baby shrimp to eat shell, feelers, eyes, and all, brilliantly peppery. Outsize crab, sweet and tender, with full meaty stomachs and exquisite coral roe. Tiny snails, actually barnacles, with wormlike bodies, which had to be pulled from their shells with a straight pin. Tenderest langoustines steamed in a pepper- and fennel-scented broth. And for dessert, raspberry tart. “I was only going to eat two oysters,” I said, moaning over the Everest of shells on my plate.

Next morning, Yanou divided us up to board two small jets, each assigned over the next seven days to visit a different Michelin two-star spot for lunch and a three-star for dinner. I knew I had landed with the A team when I saw Yanou settling in next to Danny Kaye. Al Goldstein was not happy: “I can just see the headline if this plane goes down,” he complained. “
DANNY KAYE KILLED IN PLANE CRASH.
Five Others Perish with Full Stomachs.”

First stop, Tours, in the Loire Valley. Gastroholics making the cuisinary hajj in those days often overlooked Charles Barrier’s three stars in Tours. Not us. Barrier didn’t quite look like a chef, but like an ear, nose, and throat man, Danny suggested. And the place was done, done, done, but styleless. The chef’s mousse of fresh duck liver, a recipe he’d worked on for two years, Barrier confided, glowed rosy-pink in its large white china basin—bold, provocative . . . a triumph of voluptuousness in my mouth. I looked around, wanting to share my “Oh my God” sentiments with someone similarly struck. A few of America’s great writers were unwilling even to taste it. The problem was that it looked disturbingly raw.

“I promise you it’s delicious,” I whispered to Goldstein. “Incredibly sensuous.” He shrugged. “You should be ashamed. . . . Aren’t you considered a master of eating pussy?”

He brightened. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. It would help if you’d press down on the back of my head.”

After half a dozen courses—from electrifying to stultifying—lotus-tea sorbet in a big balloon goblet bobbed into view like a life raft afloat in a sea of butter. Looking across the table, I caught a glimpse of newsprint and a photo of a naked thigh. Yanou and our Moët escorts were leafing through an issue of
Screw
.

Al had been unable to bear anonymity another minute. “I expect to go to jail within a few months under the new obscenity laws,” he was confessing. “I want to go on a full stomach.” He started collecting addresses, promising to send subscriptions to everyone. “Do you realize
smut
spelled backward is Tums?” he marveled.

Not even Truman Capote could have defined the moment as tellingly.

In off-season Biarritz, we slid into a relaxed and warm welcome at Café de Paris, and fresh duck liver, of course, this time sautéed with apples. Guccione’s sister, Jackie, had developed a taste for Dom Pérignon by then. Well, it’s fizzy, after all, just like Coke. “They should send us a case of this when we get home,” she suggested, “so we can taper off gradually.” Rich rillettes of goose with fat cracklings were a challenge at breakfast the next morning. A challenge met.

The next night, after a long and impressive feast at Roger Vergé’s handsome stone-walled Moulin de Mougins, there was sweet wine to sip with the tiny petits fours, something movingly chocolate, and shockingly tart red currants. And an intoxicating pear liqueur.

“You could get pregnant just from drinking this
poire,
” Danny announced. Danny alternated between Mr. Congeniality and Rumpelstiltskin. His bawdy high jinks quickly disillusioned the young flower from
House Beautiful
. She was shocked to realize that her childhood idol, Hans Christian Andersen, was actually a real man, a Hollywood actor, actively trying to bed her.

I found myself sleeping most of the time between meals. Perhaps foie gras was a soporific. And maybe foie-drugged sleep was a good way to escape memories. I felt Don like a ghost in so many of these rooms. We had made this same voyage of discovery together when everything was new and we were new. Increasingly, I felt woozy from sensory exhaustion. We were all eating like pigs, some of us piggier than others. Clearly, the great chefs of France were vying to stun our taste buds.

I must admit we were less than grateful to our benefactors at Moët & Chandon. There was champagne at every course. We were drowning in it. In rebellion, a few of us demanded red wine. Of course, champagne was James Beard’s prescribed cure for overindulgence. Jim never specified what to do if the overindulgence happened to be committed primarily in cascades of champagne.

“Everybody cover your head with a napkin,” Yanou cried as she demonstrated
ortolan
-eating etiquette at Troisgros in Roanne. These were the first
ortolans
of the season, plump little birds crisp-roasted but rare, to crunch and eat whole, everything but the beak. The napkin was to catch the flying juices. But in the isolation of his linen do-rag, Goldstein slipped the fat little creature into his trouser pocket, where the tattletale grease dribbled down his leg. (Later, when France outlawed eating the threatened bird, the napkin at forbidden
ortolan
feasts would also serve to hide the evidence.)

The uninhibited Troisgros brothers found a perfect playmate in Danny, who tilted a white toque atop his blond hair and pulled a chef’s jacket taut over a pillow potbelly. At one point, a French photographer marched through the dining room, holding a pig’s head aloft and insisting it was a calf’s
tête
. Most of us were too sloshed to argue. We were all deliciously drunk on food and silliness.

Lemon ice spiked with Bacardi came along to tease our palates into craving still more foie gras, this time rolled into a cabbage leaf, along with partridge and a great red Burgundy, puckery with youth and slightly chilled, the way the Troisgros family liked their local grape. Carts bearing
le grand dessert
converged from every corner, but by that time, all I could manage was a portion of Papa Troisgros’s beloved prunes poached in port and topped with a plop of crème fraîche. Did I say that’s all? And a few cookies, candied grapefruit peel, little tartlets—no one was counting.

Now Moët’s
bec-fin
house publicist, Jean-Marie Dubois, was challenging all comers to a boozy champagne game called Pomponette, pouring golden bubbly into pyramids of glasses piled high like a fountain. Even the champagne antagonists were chugalugging Dom Pérignon. Glasses were flying across the table. Five were smashed. “This is the most decadent night of my life,” Al Goldstein cried. Quite a tribute, coming from a man who had just invited us all to his next orgy.

A stop at Paul Bocuse was not on our itinerary (our confreres in the other jet had Bocuse on their dance card), but how could Yanou say no when Bocuse insisted? Besides, Collonges au Mont d’Or, outside Lyon, was only two hours away and we—well, certainly I—were already working up a hunger. Great food is like great sex: The more you have, the more you want.

Bocuse insisted we drive right up to his catering hall to hear his collection of circus calliopes and fortify ourselves with a small
mâchon lyonnaise
for a snack. The maître himself was waiting for us, hawk nose flaring, head held high in the tall toque, arms folded across his broad chest. He stood like a god beside a table laden with the air-dried leg of a pig, countless foie gras canapés, and two kilos of caviar on ice. He shouted a command, and there we were popping sturgeon eggs to the pounding choruses of “The Star-Spangled Banner” played on the calliope. “God Save the Queen” and “La Marseillaise” followed.