by Nan Lyons
Roy whispered, “Did he say anything about the screenplay?” Bobby held up his hand to signal Roy to be patient. Roy said, “Don’t let them sit you near the windows.” Then he shouted, “Hi, Barry! Sit near the bar.”
“You hear that? Sure, I’ll tell him. Barry says he agrees with you about Chasen’s.”
Roy smiled nervously and shouted, “Great minds — ”
“Barry wants to know what kind of pizza they have.”
“Forget the pizza,” Roy said. “Dustin loves the pot roast.”
Bobby shook his head from side to side. “Dustin loves the pot roast,” he repeated solemnly into the receiver.
“It’s made with Cinzano and cherries and comes with sweet-potato wonton.”
“Dustin also loved Ishtar. What else?”
“Santa Barbara shrimp with chili-peach polenta.”
“You heard?” Bobby asked.
“Does he like it?” Roy whispered.
“No,” Bobby said angrily. “You better come up with something else, and fast.”
Roy felt the sweat run down the side of his face. He got up and walked over to the phone, shouting, “Smoked duck spring roll salad!”
Bobby nodded. “He likes it.”
Roy began to giggle nervously. “It’s got snap peas, apples, and fennel in a great honey–raspberry vinegar dressing.”
“He loves it!” Bobby said, breaking into a broad grin. “This is a done deal!”
Roy mimed the words “Ask him about the screenplay.” He sat down, accidentally knocking over the sneaker boxes.
“Barry, listen, before I forget, you didn’t like that thing of Roy’s I sent you, did you? No, I didn’t think you would. Okay, so I’ll see you.”
Roy suddenly felt the sharp edges of the boxes. He leaned back, hoping the physical pain would detract from the sick feeling in his stomach. He looked up at Bobby.
“So?” Bobby asked. “What about dessert?”
Roy could barely breathe, much less speak. “What about dessert?” he coughed out. “What about me?”
Bobby rolled his eyes and slapped his belly. “Listen. Is it my fault you decided that everyone had to know what happened after Ingrid Bergman got on the plane with Paul Henreid?”
“I’ve been working on it for three years.”
“But you just saw what they really want. They want to know what to eat for lunch. You tell Diller about lunch. That’s your job. Bubbala, I understand. You live in L.A., and you caught the screenplay disease. There’s no telethon for it, but then again it’s not fatal. You’ll get over it.”
“Casablanca II is a damn good script!” Roy shouted.
“ ‘Good’? What the fuck has ‘good’ got to do with this business? You want good, go to shul.”
“I don’t want you to send it to any more producers. Send it to a director.”
“All right, I’ll send it to a director.”
“Who?”
“David Lean.”
“David Lean is dead!”
Bobby shrugged. “So he doesn’t get too many submissions.”
“Don’t do this to me, Bobby,” Roy shouted, getting up from the sneaker boxes. “I’m not some nobody. I’ve got edge. People can’t wait to see who I’ll destroy next. They read my column all over the country.”
“Because you write about food. Do me the life of Sara Lee and maybe I could sell it to television. Roy, write about what you know. Give me something like that movie about killing the great chefs. That I know I could sell.”
“You want me to write a sequel to Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?”
“You’re from New York, right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. So you must have a library card. Go look up newspaper headlines. That’s all they’re buying anyway. Take my advice, boychik, and I’ll turn you into another Shana Alexander.”
“But I hate writing about food. I hate going to restaurants, and most of all, I hate chefs!”
“Listen to you! Listen to that passion! That’s what Barry and I have been waiting for. That’s what makes Emmys and Oscars. Roy, I’m talking to you like Geraldo. Give me a true story. A docudrama. Go! Kill me a chef!”
FAX TO: Natasha O’Brien
FROM: Roy (Pussycat) Drake
After getting all my Third World shots and assuring my doctor and my liver that I won’t drink the water, I’m off to Dallas to interview your toy boy Parker. My tastebuds quiver at the prospect of eating dead animals as prepared by a subscriber to the single-bullet theory.
Thanks for a tedious lunch the other day. Just to be certain you don’t believe everything you eat, I’ve thoughtfully enclosed a copy of my piece on Le La. Fear not, Lady in the Dim, it won’t run until after I come back and interview Neal for your filthy rag. Heh heh.
MOUTHING OFF
by Roy Drake
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Just what LA. needed: a restaurant with waiters on roller skates. Oops, did I say restaurant? Neal Short’s aptly named Le La is as tongue-tied as the Three Stooges playing Shakespeare. For starters, you need an A in Geography just to read the menu: Plymouth Cranberry Soup, Niagara Farms Goat Cheese, Idaho Red Lentil Salad with Iowa Corn-Fed Pork Cracklings. Is this place an atlas or a restaurant? It looks like a restaurant (“Isn’t that Don and Melanie?”), it smells like a restaurant (“Darling, your perfume is to die!”), it sounds like a restaurant (“Waiter, bring me a phone!”), and it even charges Restaurant prices ($32.50 for six dead shrimp), hut if you’re looking for taste in this “damn the tournedos” bistro, you won’t even find it in the decor.
Pulling up to Le La, located smack-bang on LA.’s culinary skid row (aka La Cienega), one is immediately put on guard by having to surrender the car keys to a coven of Rocky Horror Show dropouts who look like the only thing they can drive is their mothers crazy. The room itself is a design disaster: all four walls are glass panels behind which flow anemic, drippy waterfalls that give one the impression of dining in utero. Or in a toilet bowl.
Which brings us to the food. While Le La ought to receive an award from the Environmental Protection Agency for recycling everyone else’s menu, it’s unlikely to survive the wrath of savvy Spagoites. What fools these chefs be to keep Pucking around with pizza. Smoked duck spring roll salad started out promisingly enough despite reclining on a schizo spread of snap peas, apple, and fennel. Unfortunately, once the unmistakable aftertaste of cardamom reared its redolent head, the spring roll promptly OD’d into an ugh roll. Grilled Santa Barbara shrimp with chili-peach polenta and fresh mint pesto was an exercise in overkill, from shrimp tougher than Bogart to a tragically inedible complex of pepper, sugar, and mint.
For his main courses, Chef Neal Short rounded up all the nouveau suspects: mahi-mahi, roughy, and skate; rabbit, venison, and duck. But as in a casting call for Pet Sematary III, everything arrived overdressed and underprepared. What ever happened to hot food? Or at least cooked food? Meats were bloody enough to have been just picked up off the rifle range. The fish was older than George Burns and salvageable only as bait. While focusing, however myopically, on veggies, the kitchen did manage to turn out a credible quartet of turnip chips, deep-fried spinach, tomato-stuffed potatoes, and an acceptable celery custard.
Also on the plus side was a napoleon of roast pork layered with rectangles of crisp Pernod potatoes and velvety cabbage mousse; and a tangy pot roast braised with Cinzano and showered with cherries. Shareholders in L.A. Power and Light take note: both dishes were actually heated higher than body temperature. Hurrah! One need not starve to death at Le La -- at least not until the FDA decides that it’s safe to eat rare pork.
You can’t go wrong with dessert. There’s only one choice: a platter filled with more tarts than a Nevada brothel.
Le La keeps coming up Short due to lack of imagination coupled with fear of frying. If the chef got his act together, redecorated, hired a new staff, and changed the menu, this could well become a four-star, instead of just a movi
e-star, hangout.
But is that going to happen?
Not.
NATASHA PRESSED THE INTERCOM for her secretary. “Get me the Hemlock Society!”
“It’s that bad?” Ester asked.
Natasha looked down at her desk. The layout for the premier issue of American Cuisine was covered with shreds of nail polish. “You’re right. I’m overreacting.” Her voice grew tight. “Make it the National Rifle Association.”
“That tone,” Ester sighed. “You must have torn every cuticle.”
Natasha sat back with mixed feelings of horror and relief. IT had finally happened. She spread her fingers and stared at the jagged cuticles, bitten nails, and chipped polish. Her neurotic fear that something terrible was about to happen had finally taken shape and reared its ugly layout. Having conceived, piloted, and approved the editorial content of the issue, she had given it to the art director before leaving for L.A.
The door to Natasha’s triangular office at the apex of the Flatiron building swung open to reveal Ester, an almost perfectly square woman. The ex-KGB agent wore flowered two-piece dresses and enormous blobs of costume jewelry. After the dissolution of the KGB, she had divorced her third husband and come to New York, where she put herself through secretarial school by working as a manicurist at Louis Licari’s posh hair salon. The combination of talents had made her irresistible to Natasha. She had hired Ester, who brought her chihuahua, Pushkin, to work every day. He slept like a paperweight atop the IN basket.
Ester adjusted her shoulder pads and put her manicure kit down on Natasha’s glass-topped desk. “And I thought there was pressure working in the Kremlin.” Natasha pulled back her hands, but Ester grabbed a wrist and smiled menacingly. “Nyet so fast, comrade.”
“I am not your comrade! I am your boss!” And then suddenly melting as she showed Ester her hands, she said, “Save me before I bite again.”
Ester shook her head at the sight of Natasha’s nails. “It would take the entire cast of Bambi to save you.”
“Please, Ester. Man has entered the forest.”
Ester rolled her eyes. “Fucking up the forest is what man does best.” She pulled up a Bauhaus chair that had belonged to Louis Kohner, the first of Achille’s victims. “You Americans never learn. It’s always forgive and forget. What this country needs is a good salt mine!” Louis’s books lined the wall opposite the framed menus from dinners at which Natasha had cooked dessert. “I always liked the little skunk in that movie.”
Natasha took a deep breath and closed her eyes as Ester went to work on her nails. The skunk’s name was Wylie Phelps Norton.
NATASHA MARCHED through the art department radiating determination from her fingers to her Fioruccis, despite not having a clue as to who could replace Wylie. Never one to take a maitre d’s suggestions seriously, she had refused to hire a personnel manager. She did know one thing: she wasn’t about to replace Wiley with his longtime assistant. Bad chefs rarely had good sous-chefs. The person to check out was the one furthest from the top — the prep man.
“What do you think of this layout?” she asked, waving it at Arnold Berkowitz, the new kid in pasteup.
“I think it’s great,” he said quickly.
Natasha smiled. “Thanks.” So much for that theory. She walked away, scanning the room for the next candidate.
“You really want to know what I think?”
Natasha turned back.
Arnold was very nervous. “Listen, I’m from Newark, and I’m also not gay. You know how hard it is for me to find work as an artist?”
“I guarantee immunity. Tell me about the issue.”
“It stinks. Almost as much as Jersey.” Arnold grabbed the layout from her. “Listen, even the cover is lousy. This is a food magazine, right?”
“I used to think so.”
“No offense, since you are one of the seven fancy-shmancy chefs on the cover, but I think a zaftig hunk of chocolate cake would sell a lot more copies.”
She opened to the article on winter soups. “Keep going.”
“This is still confidential?”
“As far as I know, you hang out in leather bars.”
“What are you selling here? Antique soup bowls or soup? Like they don’t have women wearing overcoats in Playboy. If you catch my drift.” He hesitated and lowered his voice. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t let it get around that I actually read Playboy.”
“What’s your favorite restaurant?”
“You know Dominick’s in the Bronx?”
She began to laugh. “In the what?”
“Their pork chops and peppers are like a Renaissance painting. You get this gigantic platter filled with thick grilled chops and big fat slabs of red pepper dripping with oil and vinegar.”
“Describe the platter.”
Arnold looked at her as though she’d gone crazy. “Who knows? I only remember the food.”
“Lay it out. A full page. Bring it to my office in half an hour. With a redo on the winter soups piece.”
“In half an hour? That’s a joke, right?”
“I’ve got a short attention span. You’ve got thirty minutes to cross the state line.”
Natasha continued down the corridor toward Wylie’s office. She knocked sharply on the glass door. He looked up from a desk strewn with photos. Wylie was in his late forties, with white hair cut short. He wore broad-striped shirts and different-colored suspenders every day, but always a yellow tie.
“How long have I known you, Wylie?” she asked, tossing the pages onto his desk.
“Uh-oh. I guess we didn’t like Mr. Layout.”
“We hate it.”
Wylie cleared his throat and took a deep breath. “Well, then, to answer your question, you’ve known me since before Bill ran Bon Appetit, since before Gail ran Gourmet, since before Mary. . .” He narrowed his eyes and sighed wearily. “I guess I’ve been around through all the prima donnas who came and went.”
Natasha nodded. “Wylie, what’s your favorite restaurant?”
“Grenouille.”
“Why?”
“So many reasons. The flowers, the lighting — I just love those ricky-tick little lamps. . . .”
“What about the food?”
His face screwed up as though she’d asked an absurd question. “The food?”
Natasha slapped the palm of her hand on his desk. “The food, goddamn it!” She opened the layout to a full page of a chef standing in the middle of an empty restaurant. “Where the hell is the leg of lamb? I don’t want Scavullo mood shots!” She turned the pages angrily. “Why aren’t the cakes sliced so you can see what they look like inside?” Another page. “This typeface is unreadable.” Next page. “Is this an ad or editorial?” More pages. “And these Ming soup tureens look like something out of a Sotheby’s catalog!”
“You don’t think they’re beautiful?”
“That’s the problem! They’re too beautiful! We’re selling food, not silverware or paisley tablecloths or Ming bowls!”
“I am simply trying to broaden the horizons of our devoted readership of neurotics with eating disorders. And I’ll have you know, that silver came from James Robinson!”
“I don’t care if it came from Edward G. Robinson! This hen is stuffed with figs, goat cheese, and spinach. And that’s what I want to see!”
Wylie’s face grew tight. “Then perhaps you should look up its ass.”
“I think I just did.” Natasha picked up the layout. “How long will it take you to get yours out of here?”
“Stop playing Hepburn. You’ll never get this issue done without me.”
“Correction, pal: I’ll never get it done with you.” She opened the door. “Tell accounting to give you a fourteen-karat parachute. But don’t ask me for a recommendation. I’m a lousy liar.”
She opened the door and walked past Arnold as he worked feverishly. “Last train to Manhattan, kiddo.”
* * *
WITHIN THE HALF HOUR, Ester rushed into Natas
ha’s office and leaned back against the closed door. “You like the way Ester Berkowitz sounds, or should I hyphenate?”
“Ester, just send Arnold in.”
“You’ll keep your hands off?”
Natasha laughed. “I’ll force myself.”
Arnold strode into Natasha’s office and stood at her desk. “What did you do to Wylie?”
“I fired him.”
“For what?”
“For medical reasons. He had a massive art attack.”
Arnold slapped his palm against his cheek. “You mean, you fire people around here just because you don’t like the way they do their jobs?”
“Bizarre, isn’t it?” She held out her hand for the pages.
Arnold sat down. “You will notice I took out all the soup bowls and used copper pots. Except for one. Symmetrical is too Connecticut.”
Natasha leaned back. Arnold had managed to translate his own hunger onto the page. He was right: it wasn’t symmetrical. He had drawn a spillover onto one of the pots. It was real. She looked at the page with the pork chops and peppers. Torn pieces of bread on the edge of the plate and crumbs on the tablecloth had brought it to life. “You know, I can pick up the phone and get a hundred Wylies in here within the hour.”
“Don’t try to bargain with me. I want to be paid what Mr. Suspenders was paid.”
“In your dreams! Wylie’s had years of experience on every food magazine published since — ”
“You need me,” Arnold said.
“And you need me. Take the rest of the layout home. I want it on my desk, completed, tomorrow morning.”
“Hey, you expect me to stay up all night?”
“Yes. That’s very New York.”
“I can do it.” He hesitated. “Listen . . .”
Natasha smiled. “We’ll talk money tomorrow.”
“Considering you run the place, you’re all right.”
She nodded. “I am now.”
* * *
BUT ONLY TWO HOURS LATER, Natasha felt all wrong. Something had unnerved her. She put down the résumé and looked straight into the eyes of the man applying for the job of executive assistant. “I have the strangest feeling we’ve met before.”