Steal the Menu (14 page)

Abe’s younger secretary waved me in: “He’s expecting you.”

There he was, a caricature of all the descriptions you may have read or photographs you may have seen of Abe: small and pudgy, bad skin, shirttails working their way out of his pants, an endearingly failed stab at a preppy look—bow tie and blue oxford-cloth shirt.

His expression was dark, but not scowling. Yet he was clearly troubled. Regret filled the room. Without admitting it, A. M. Rosenthal was taking care of a mistake. That would be me.

“This isn’t working out,” he said.

I waited for an explanation. Instead, he waffled: “Some people like what you do. Others loathe it. We will tell anyone who asks that you resigned for personal reasons. And the severance arrangement will be significantly more generous than the routine formula. I regret this a great deal. I’ve only done this twice before since I became managing editor.”

He came to a halt, expectantly. It was my turn.

“I regret it, too. I was hoping to continue through the end of the year because of the Quadrangle book.”

Abe looked confused. I explained about the anthology of
Times
recipes and how my departure would compromise the prospects of the book. He made a note to himself. That very afternoon, he called Herb Nagourney, trying, unsuccessfully, to quash the project.
There seemed to be nothing more to say. He had canned me, without offering an explanation. I suppose I could have demanded some rationale, but I knew it would be pure waffle that couldn’t be used in a lawsuit.

It turns out Abe assumed that I would do what the other misfortunates he’d fired had done. Determined to stay at the
Times
, they’d brought in the Newspaper Guild or a lawyer of their own and negotiated a new assignment in some dark corner of the paper. You couldn’t be fired without cause at the
New York Times
, unless you let it happen.

I let it happen. And, as Rosenthal later told my friend Joseph Lelyveld, a career
Times
man and eventual executive editor, I was the only person he’d ever fired who had just shrugged and gone home.

So I was defrocked, denuded of power, of test kitchen, of company American Express card. Defooded.

Relief swept over me. I would never have to take food seriously again. I was out of that fat-slick cage for good. Relief at this realization helped to counter the painful truth that I’d been given the boot. Such complete failure, total rejection—I couldn’t believe it had happened to me. But then I quickly did come to believe it—on that first Monday when I looked around after breakfast and wondered what to do with the rest of the day.

I’d always wanted to work from home, but this fantasy had included a full-time salary, benefits and an expense account from a major publication. Now I had the dream but nothing to support it or the nonworking wife and two children at St. Ann’s School, at the other end of Brooklyn Heights from our comfortable duplex. Fortunately, the apartment, with a garden and a small office for me, cost almost nothing.

I would still have panicked if it hadn’t been for the advance for
Great Recipes from The New York Times
, half of it still untouched in the bank and the other half owed after publication later in the year.
My
Times
severance would cover the summer, which we spent in our country place near Oneonta in central New York.

While Margaret prepared mentally for her first year at NYU law school in the fall, which she paid for with a federally guaranteed loan and which also had the side benefit of getting us all health insurance, I put out feelers for jobs in mainstream journalism and filled the weeks until my thirty-second birthday with writing a novel.

It was a short novel, eventually titled
Native Intelligence
, about a Peace Corps volunteer who flips out in a remote tribal village and dies. It evolved out of an anecdote I’d heard from my sister, Ada Jo Mann, who had been a Peace Corps volunteer with her husband, Tom, in Chad. The other impetus was a Quechua-English dictionary that my friend Peter Quint had brought me from a trip to Peru. I used it as the basis of the fake language in the novel.

Every morning I would retreat to the typewriter and bat out three thousand words, no more, no less. At the end of thirty days, I was done.

Never since have I been able to work with such discipline or so effectively. The shock of being fired overwhelmed any inhibitions I might have had about trying my hand at fiction. Also, I knew by mid-July that I’d be working as a fill-in writer at
Time
starting in August. My Harvard classmate Lance Morrow, a fixture there and a gifted essayist, had found me a spot in the non-news “back of the book.” I would have preferred to return to
Newsweek
, but the editor, Osborn Elliott, wouldn’t have me, because I’d made too much of a pest of myself as an anti-war activist for his taste. Thirty years later, by which time he’d decided I’d put away childish things as an arts editor at the
Wall Street Journal
, he joked across a dinner table about how when I’d worked for him, I’d been “a Communist.”

I liked
Time
. For several weeks, I reported to the senior editor in charge of the non-arts half of the back of the book, a sardonic
mensch called Leon Jaroff. He was a talented science writer, and he had me writing about psychology and sex. The tone was serious, the standards high—much higher than my prejudiced image of Brand X, as we at
Newsweek
had referred to our senior rival in the newsweekly world.

At a certain point, I got transferred to the cultural side and wrote about television for Chris Porterfield, another smart gent. But the high point of my brief sojourn at the magazine was the cover story I wrote about plastic surgery under another enlightened senior editor, Larry Barrett.

The plastic surgery cover project had been knocking around for a while before it landed on me. If I recall correctly, there were already two full drafts that had failed to get into the magazine. One important problem had been the difficulty of finding an appropriate color picture to put on the cover that would exemplify the phenomenon of facial reconstruction without looking ghastly or ridiculous. Clearly shots of medically necessary plastic surgery—rebuilt elephant men and the like—were nonstarters. Cosmetic surgery could provide either images of successful procedures, which would have looked like any other pretty face, or unsuccessful operations—say, nose jobs with cavernous nostrils—which would have undermined the seriousness of the cover essay envisaged by the top editor, Henry Anatole Grunwald. (We met more as equals much later on, when, retired and half-blind from macular degeneration, he submitted to me, at the
Journal
, occasional columns on the decline of culture and civility.)

Henry was a phenomenon in American journalism, a polyglot and polymath, the son of a leading lyricist of Viennese operettas. The family had fled Hitler and settled in New York in 1940, when Henry was eighteen, too old to lose his accent but quick to find a toehold at
Time
as a copyboy while still a student at NYU.

Although I had little contact with Mr. Grunwald that summer
and fall, I got the impression that he was taking an interest in me. The regular change in my assignments, if nothing else, suggested that somebody on high was trying me out. The plastic surgery cover was pretty clearly meant to be my final exam, after which I might well be put on staff as a permanent employee.

I sensed this, but I found it difficult to take the project seriously. For me, plastic surgery was mostly a source of jokes about nose jobs and Brazilian babes who’d had their belly buttons removed. But
Time
had amassed a huge file that supported the theory that plastic surgery was a major social trend in America and therefore a topic worthy of the spotlight and the sanctification of a
Time
cover. I read and reread the files Larry Barrett had given me. Suppressing my misgivings, I had begun to write the article when Barrett told me about a piece of “luck.” A potential cover picture was available. Elizabeth Taylor had made a film in which her character underwent plastic surgery. Paramount was offering us access to stills from
Ash Wednesday
, and I was going to fly out to Los Angeles to screen the film.

I did so the next day, catching an early plane and returning the same night on a redeye. In between, I cabbed to an office in Beverly Hills, where Bob Evans, already a Hollywood legend before he produced
Chinatown
, received me in his capacity as head of production for the studio. We were alone across a desk whose most memorable furnishing was a clear Plexiglas box filled with hundred-dollar bills.

After the briefest of chats, Evans led me through a door into an elegant little screening room. He left and the dreadful melodrama began. It was about a fiftyish wife who gets a full-body makeover on the q.t. in Switzerland so she can win back a wandering spouse—and combines the surgery with an affair of her own with Helmut Berger.

I sat through the thing, taking notes. Then I flew home, rewriting the lead of my cover story on the plane.

I sent a new draft to Barrett, who was not excited by it. Well, neither was I. But I could tell that the project was too important to get spiked. Mr. Grunwald was very committed. Then fate intervened.

A still from
Ash Wednesday
was selected, showing Taylor looking perfect, postop, in a hospital gown. But then Liz was hospitalized, for a malady by now long forgotten among the more than seventy other hospitalizations in her career.
Time
couldn’t put a picture of Taylor on its cover playing a plastic surgery patient in the same week she’d turned into a real patient. The story was killed. My career at
Time
survived this reverse, but I was still not on the masthead by December, when I felt obliged to take a leave from the magazine in order to go on an eighteen-city book tour to promote
Great Recipes from The New York Times
. Before I left, I requested a meeting with Mr. Grunwald. I wanted him to evaluate my work for him so far. It was, he said, glib. But he’d be glad to see me in January.

Herb Nagourney went all out for my book. He sent me everywhere during the three weeks before Christmas 1973. I cooked Chinese tea-smoked duck on the hot plates of television morning shows all over the country. I took a twenty-mile cab ride to a snowbound suburban FM station outside Cleveland. I met dozens of food editors and got so bleary from the routine of daily flights and nonstop appointments that one morning in Seattle I convinced myself that a reporter with a French last name really was French; I proceeded to address her in her “native” language for five minutes before abruptly excusing myself to make a flight to Portland.

In Miami, a perky radio show hostess alleged that one of the recipes in the press release that had come with her review copy
had a mistake in it. I was horrified to see that she was right. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to look at the text of the recipe as it appeared in the book. It was correct. I was happy, but I was also impressed with this eagle-eyed woman who had detected a problem no one else in a dozen and a half cities had noticed. Sally Jessy Raphael eventually rocketed out of Key Biscayne to syndicated national talk shows on radio and television.

All in all, I had a great time promoting
Great Recipes
, but, despite a first printing of twenty thousand copies and my best efforts, the book didn’t sell. So when I got home, I felt a bit sheepish handing in my expense sheets to Herb Nagourney. He merely shrugged and gave me the good news about the $75,000 book-club sale he’d just made to the Literary Guild. I would keep the lion’s share of that—enough for the Sokolov family to live on for two years. I still felt bad about the failure of
Great Recipes
in bookstores.

After a year or so, however, I began to suspect that something good was happening with my book. Royalty checks kept coming in every six months, generated by sales of a reprint edition issued under the Evergreen imprint by an outfit called Barre Publishing. Given the low royalty rate for reprint editions, I ought to have calculated that my royalty checks implied brisk sales. I should have connected those numbers with occasional reports I got from friends about having seen my book for sale on remainder tables in bookstores, with an attractive blue cover. (The original Quadrangle edition had a garish, multicolored jacket.)