From Scratch

by Allen Salkin

  In those days a bumper crop of fully formed food celebrities did not exist, so Reese, Joe, and the others simply went casting about for chefs with presentation skills and looks that might work on television. The hires might seem random, as if anyone who could flip an omelette would do, but even in rough form the team was exactly how Reese had envisioned it: a few TV professionals who could get the job done no matter what was burning around them, combined with enough food experts to fulfill the mission conferred in the network’s name—not just “television network,” but “television FOOD network.” If Reese knew next to nothing about food, he knew enough to know to ask for help.

  In March 1993, Sue Huffman, the former food editor of Ladies’ Home Journal and then the director of consumer affairs for the packaged food giant Best Foods, attended a party thrown by the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) in New York. There, she was introduced to Pat O’Gorman and her husband, Reese. He was a month away from signing the key papers with investors, and the conversation quickly turned to his TV project. Sue had been intrigued about the network since reading about the proposal in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “They’re Playing a Game of Chicken to Decide Who Rules the Roost”:

  The architect of the food network is no epicurean. “I’m a meat-and-potatoes guy,” says Mr. Schonfeld, who, at 215 pounds, says he is satisfied with his waistline. He envisions live call-in shows, “something with food and celebrities,” he says, as well as programs on food and health and a weekly half-hour show, How to Feed Your Family on $75 a Week.

  The day after the party, Sue received a call from her old boss, Myrna Blyth, the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal. “I just found your next job,” Myrna said.

  “I wasn’t aware I was looking,” Sue replied.

  Reese had been meeting with every person in the food world he could find. Myrna had just had a meal with Reese and he’d told her he needed someone to develop a schedule of programming for TVFN, someone who knew food, because he didn’t.

  “Well, it’s Sue Huffman,” Myrna told him.

  “That’s interesting.” Reese said. “I just met her last night.”

  An hour later, Sue’s phone rang again, and Reese asked if she’d be a paid consultant and draw up an improved version of the programming scheme. She knew magazines, and he wanted the programming day at the network to unfold like the sections of a magazine: news, how-to, health, and entertainment.

  She agreed, and soon dropped off the schedule at Reese’s apartment on a Sunday on her way to LaGuardia Airport. It had deeper descriptions of the basic show ideas. As Sue and her husband drove through traffic, she thought, “Okay, I earned a couple of shekels out of this and I’ll never hear from him again, so that’s that.”

  She was wrong. The schedule was good enough for Reese to show to the cable system operators he and Colony were still trying to bring to the closing table, and he touted Sue’s pedigree in the food world and her affiliation with Best Foods to advertisers. But most important to Reese, Sue knew Julia Child.

  Reese wanted to have the undisputed queen of TV cooking associated with TVFN in whatever way he could. In the late spring of 1993, Sue and Reese flew up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a dinner meeting with Julia, her boyfriend John McJennett (Paul Child had been in a nursing home since 1989 and died in 1994), and Nancy Barr, Julia’s friend and producer—who had introduced Sue to Reese at the IACP party.

  Julia’s television contracts with PBS and Good Morning America, where she was a regular contributor, forbade her from cooking on any other networks, but Reese and Sue suggested they could offer her a contract to appear sporadically on TVFN delivering commentaries on the food world and sitting as an interview subject: no sautéing, stuffing, or trussing required. Julia agreed in principle, especially motivated by the idea that TVFN was going to figure out a way to secure the rights to her old shows and broadcast them, a task Reese said he was working on.

  Although there was an agreement in principle, it took some negotiating to hammer out details. Reese was so desperate to tell cable providers at a June 8 sales meeting that Julia was aboard that TVFN’s lawyers exchanged a flurry of faxes with Julia’s lawyer, William Truslow, negotiating the language Reese could use to describe her relationship with the network. Truslow warned her not to commit to too much, noting that even if she agreed to contribute some kind of television essay only once a week, that would mean fifty-two essays a year—some of which would appear at the same time her new PBS series Cooking with Master Chefs was debuting. He also warned her that if she entered a contract to do fifty-two essays and then couldn’t deliver, she was opening herself up to being sued. “If they have obtained advertisers on the basis that you are going to appear every week—and you may be sure that is how they are going to obtain advertisers—then the damages could be more than nominal,” Truslow wrote. A day before the affiliates meeting, Reese was able to announce:

  We are pleased to say that we have been talking with Julia Child about her appearing from time to time on the Food Channel to contribute occasional short television essays and commentary on various subjects relating to food and gastronomy. . . . While Mrs. Child has agreed to the general concept of occasional contributions, we are still in the process of working out the arrangement with her, which hopefully will be completed in the near future.

  By summer 1993, Sue was officially the director of programming at TVFN. Reese gave her a small ownership stake in the network, carved out of his own share. He had done the same to entice George Babick to come aboard as the head of advertising sales.

  —

  He turned his attention to the news show that he saw as the most important piece of the programming puzzle. The first day Rochelle Brown showed up for work, Reese issued a command to her: “Help me find a way to get Donna Hanover on the phone!”

  Donna was a veteran local news anchor who had been working at various New York stations for years. Her husband, former federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, was running for mayor, aiming to unseat the incumbent, David Dinkins.

  When Reese called and asked Donna to come in for a meeting, she did not know what it was about, but she respected him and agreed. Donna, with short, blond anchorwoman’s hair, dressed in a sensible skirt suit, showed up at Reese’s cramped headquarters, and Reese explained he was working on launching a food channel.

  “Why are you thinking of me?” she asked, taking in the cramped office. “I’m honored, but I am the queen of order-in.”

  “I want somebody that understands a tally light,” Reese said, referring to the red light on top of a television camera that indicates it is live. “Someone who can teach all the food experts television.”

  He explained to Donna that the heart of the network would be a newsroom from which other programs radiated like spokes around a hub. Reese was doing what had worked before. At start-up, CNN had had that structure, a focus on the anchor desk with various softer shows arrayed at the edges of the schedule, such as People Tonight and Larry King Live. This would be CNN with stoves.

  Reese wanted Donna to co-anchor the hard news program, to be called Food News and Views. He remembered how, in its early days, CNN had reported on the independent 1980 presidential candidate John Anderson. The major networks had been ignoring Anderson, focusing on the race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, so CNN had made Anderson its story, covering his rallies with serious attention. Carter’s refusal to allow Anderson to participate in televised presidential debates became major news, and CNN attracted historic ratings by taping Anderson answering debate questions in real time and cobbling together a tape-delayed version of the debate with his responses inserted in proper sequence.

  Reese aimed for Food News and Views to find the food world equivalent of John Anderson, a story the world would take notice of. It needed a seasoned TV news anchor. Reese pledged to pair Donna with a food expert. It didn’t matter who. Donna was key.

 
What he didn’t tell Donna was that having her aboard also made sense for the same reason he had signed Robin Leach: she was somebody. Donna could be depended on to talk about the network at cocktail parties amongst the New York political and media elite. And if her husband happened to win the mayoral election, all the better—not only for the network’s stature, but for its chances of being picked up by Manhattan’s primary cable provider, Time Warner.

  Donna wasn’t sure. Reese seemed confident and his track record was amazing, but a 24-hour food network? No one had invented smell-o-vision, she reasoned. It’s one thing to talk a chef through a six-minute cooking segment on a local morning show, an exercise she had presided over many times, but an entire network focused on something that was all about taste and smell, except viewers couldn’t taste or smell it?

  She agreed to think about it and do a screen test. Maybe Reese knows more than me, she thought as she squeezed out of the office. She did not have a full-time television gig at the time, so she was open.

  —

  Finding a food expert to cohost Food News & Views, whether or not Donna took the job, was a matter of less thought for Reese. Anyone who knew a little bit would do.

  David Rosengarten, as it turned out, knew more than a little. David had made a career switch in the mid-1980s when he was teaching theater courses at Skidmore College and had walked into a gourmet food shop in downtown Saratoga Springs advertising cooking classes. He was fascinated with food; his father, Lenny, had had a restaurant, Seafood City, which had failed when David was a geeky eleven-year-old; he remembered the pale lifelessness of the zipper showroom where his father returned to work. There were no steaming clams there, no sizzling swordfish. Lenny had channeled his kitchen wisdom into his son, patiently explaining how each kind of seafood required its own type of batter for frying; scallops, for instance, needed the heaviest batter, lest it slide off.

  Inside that gourmet shop in Saratoga Springs in 1983, David had an irrepressible urge to see his name on the list of cooking instructors. He asked the woman running the shop if teachers were paid. They were, and she agreed to give him a tryout. The following Saturday he taught a class on how to cook Szechuan Shrimp. His students, a small group of local women, were charmed. He was invited back, and eventually his students started taking him out to dinner and toasting his skills and his cleverness. His undergrads in Introduction to Directing at Skidmore never gave him this kind of love.

  Instead of risking everything on one food venture like his father had, David decided to try to make it as a food writer. He moved to Manhattan and became friends with a charismatic young sommelier named Josh Wesson he’d met at a “New American” restaurant called Hubert’s. Soon, with the help of a literary agent, they sold a book to Simon & Schuster called Red Wine with Fish: The New Art of Matching Wine with Food, published in 1989.

  During the period when David was trying to catch on as a writer, Tony Hendra, a British-born comic actor most famous for playing the manager of the fictitious heavy metal band in the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, had begun writing food and beverage—mostly beverage—columns for the New York Observer. At one point, the beery Hendra embarked on a nostalgic tour of all the bars named Blarney Stone in New York City—there were six in 1991—finding that “they all have that great porridgey fug and that dear old rodent-colored meat on the steam table.” Josh Wesson knew Hendra, and soon they were fantasizing with David about an idea for a TV show that would feature their diverse talents. Most food shows since the start of television had been instructional: a chef facing a stove and demonstrating a recipe in what came to be known as a “dump and stir” format. The show the three men planned, full of skits and gags, would be a departure. The conceit was that Tony would play a food ignoramus being taught the basics of wine by Josh and of food by David. Called Your Basic Food Group, it would be infused with a pop culture attitude.

  They could imagine only one venue for it, because there was almost only one venue for a food show—PBS. WGBH in Boston was the producer of most PBS food programs, having launched The French Chef in 1963 and carried on from there, and David, Tony, and Josh found a WGBH producer, Laurie Donnelly, who pitched the idea to PBS. When the station agreed to finance a pilot, David thought he was on the verge of everything he had ever dreamed about.

  Not that there weren’t bumps. When the pilot was done, WGBH executives liked it, but asked for changes. They wanted a theme to carry through each episode. A second pilot was made, then a third was ordered, all of which added up to more than $200,000 spent. That was the way things were done at the center of the food TV business prior to Food Network. At the executives’ request, the show was renamed Three Men in a Kitchen, echoing the title of a recent hit movie, Three Men and a Baby. Eager to make a third pilot that would really knock their socks off, Hendra convinced his friends, the magicians Penn and Teller, to appear. They demonstrated how to make a Valentine’s Day blancmange, a sweet gelatin dish shaped into a heart. When cut into with a sharp knife, it spurted blood made of corn syrup and food coloring.

  David knew Julia Child because he and Josh had started a newsletter called The Wine & Food Companion. When he had gone to Julia’s home with his wife and newborn daughter to collect information for an article on omelettes, Julia, generous but always straightforward, had opened the front door, gazed at the child, and asked, “Is she going to need milk or is she on the home dairy?” David’s wife blushed.

  David convinced Julia to do a turn for the third pilot. She strapped on her apron and demonstrated how to make a “strawberry fool,” a mixture of berries and whipped cream. As she beat it vigorously, the fool became so aerated that it rose fluffily over the side of her mixing bowl. “I was at the White House once, cooking for them,” Julia told the camera, “and I made this. And it always slops over the top of the bowl, so this is what I did,” she said, bending over and giving a hearty blow—Pthhhht!—which shot the dessert off the edge and back into the bowl. She burst into laughter.

  By early 1992, WGBH seemed poised to order a whole season of Three Men in a Kitchen for broadcast. But one day that winter, David received a phone call from the producer.

  “David, it’s Laurie,” she said. “I’ve got some bad news.”

  “After they spent all that money?” he responded.

  “It doesn’t make any sense, but I’m afraid so.”

  A new head of programming had come in at PBS and axed Three Men in a Kitchen. “Diversity” was the word of the day. “PBS,” Laurie quoted the executive explaining the decision, “does not need a show with three white men in a kitchen.” In fact, the public network seemed uninterested in adding new cooking shows of any hue. Geoffrey Drummond, who produced Julia Child’s later series for PBS, as well as The Frugal Gourmet, had been suggesting they expand cooking shows out of weekend hours, and been told, “This is the network of Nova and The News Hour. Sesame Street. We are not interested in spending any more time in the kitchen than we already do.”

  David was devastated.

  Not far removed from his theater studies days, David decided to try to view the setback as if he were a veteran of the Great White Way: “Yesterday they told you you would not go far,” he sang to himself, quoting the song “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” “Next day on your dressing room they’ve hung a star.”

  But the next day did not seem to be coming. It took three years for Gourmet to run an article David had written on balsamic vinegar, which paid $1,500. His book agent, David Chalfant, had been nagging him for months to reach out to a TV producer named Charlie Pinsky who produced a number of high-quality PBS food shows. “Get to Charlie!” Chalfant would repeat to Rosengarten whenever the writer complained that his career was stalled. Charlie produced Pierre Franey, a renowned French chef who had a successful series on PBS in which he traveled through America cooking in gorgeous locations.

  David had been reluctant. He was full of ego, but not sure what h
e had to back it up. Charlie Pinsky produced slick shows. Perhaps he’d be allergic to the schmaltz of Three Men in a Kitchen. But one Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1993, sitting in his apartment sweating, David was feeling just desperate enough to place the call.

  The producer picked up.

  “Charlie, my name is David Rosengarten.”

  David’s newsletter had made enough of a mark among serious food people that Pinsky had heard of him. “Yeah, I know who you are.”

  Emboldened, David dove in: “Well, I’d really love to meet with you sometime and talk with you about a possible TV project.”

  “The timing is bad, I’m packing right now, I’m leaving tomorrow for France for six months to shoot with Pierre Franey.”

  That’s that, David thought. Time to back out gracefully: “All right, well, when you come back. . . .”

  “Well, wait a second,” Charlie said, remembering something. “Where do you live?”

  It turned out they lived only a few blocks apart.

  “You know, I’ve got to take a break from packing. I’ll tell you what, I’ll walk over and say hi.”

  Ten minutes after Charlie arrived, he was studying David’s videotape of Three Men in a Kitchen.

  “Okay, you’re good on TV,” Charlie said, after watching for a while. “Listen, before I go to France tomorrow, I’m having lunch with a guy named Reese Schonfeld. Do you know Reese?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he’s starting this thing called the Television Food Network. Have you heard about that?”

  “Honestly, no.”