by Allen Salkin
“Okay, well, Reese is probably gonna ask me for some names of people for, you know, talent. Do you mind if I mention your name?”
David was thrilled. “No, mention my name. Yes.”
David was correct that he was not Charlie’s tasse de thé. But Joe Langhan, when he set up the meeting between Charlie and Reese, had told Charlie that TVFN was going to be “like a factory. We have to mass-produce shows and knock them out fast.” What Charlie took from the conversation was that TVFN was not going to pay him well to produce the kind of high-end shows he liked, but he wanted to be helpful while gracefully steering TVFN away from himself. David might be just what Reese and Joe were looking for: a guy who knew something about food and would not soon get tired of being on camera. Anyway, David was all Charlie had to offer Reese the next day at lunch.
The next day, David’s phone rang and an unfamiliar voice greeted him.
“Dave Rosengarten?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have a meeting with Charlie Pinsky and you showed him a tape?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you possibly messenger that tape to us?”
“Sure.”
Two days later, another brusque phone call: “David Rosengarten?”
“Yes.”
“Would you be so kind as to come to a studio on West Fifty-seventh Street? We’d like to do a little test.”
David had no knowledge of what they wanted from him. Would he be asked to demonstrate Szechuan Shrimp? But, like anyone looking for a break, he went. Outside he saw a professionally dressed woman with short blond hair. He did not watch much local news, or follow local politics closely. He did know a lot about stinky French cheeses. “Do you know if the Television Food Network is here?” he asked her.
“Well, the network is not here,” she said. “But I am supposed to show up to do something for the Television Food Network, too, and this is where we’re supposed to be.”
“All right, well, great! My name’s David Rosengarten.”
“Hi,” the woman replied. “My name is Donna Hanover.”
They went in together and were shown to a stage with spotlights trained on a table in the center. It was dark all around. They each took a chair.
A voice from the darkness barked, “Start talking!”
“What do you want us to talk about?” David asked, peering into the darkness.
“What did you have for lunch!” the voice barked again.
“Well, er, Donna, I had a tuna salad sandwich for lunch, it was pretty good. How about you? What did you have for lunch?”
David was good at banter and Donna started enjoying herself. She felt like she would enjoy working with him.
Reese had seen enough. David could talk. The talent he really cared about, Donna, had taken to him. The food person, Charlie, had said David knew his stuff. He’d do.
Four minutes into the test, David saw a six-foot-three figure come hulking out of the darkness. Reese walked up to the table and, ignoring David, extended his hand to Donna.
“I think we found our co-anchor!” he said to her.
“Co-anchor for what?” David thought. “Me? Her? When? Who is this tall man?”
Reese strode away from the table without so much as a glance at Rosengarten. David saw his agent walk off after the tall man.
David said good-bye to Donna and went home. A few hours later, he heard from his agent: “Well, I hope this is okay with you, Dave,” David Chalfant said. “You have a contract for two years at a hundred thousand dollars a year, being the co-anchor of a nightly news kind of magazine show about food.” Donna had also agreed to come aboard.
Rosengarten, uncharacteristically, was too stunned to speak.
“It was instant simpatico. He is like a nuclear physicist of food.”
—DONNA HANOVER
With that pillar of the schedule in place, Reese turned his attention to the softer shows on the schedule, contacting his old friends Allen Reid and Mady Land. Since the late 1980s, the couple had been producing Cookin’ USA for the Nashville Network (which eventually became TNN and then Spike), starring Merle Ellis, a butcher. Knowing Reese might soon be looking for new talent, whenever Allen and Mady saw a guest they liked, they asked the chef to tape five extra solo minutes. They now had a stockpile of sample tapes.
In August 1993, the producing couple went to New York to see Reese, tapes in tow. They began suggesting shows he might want, but Reese didn’t care that a certain chef might be famous for his expertise with seafood or Italian cuisine. There was no seafood or Italian show planned for launch. Reese wanted to plug in talent to do the shows in the schedule Sue had helped draw up. One show concept Reese was particularly fixated on was How to Boil Water. It was the idea of Reese’s friend Jim Gaines, a Time magazine editor who had recently gotten divorced and did not know how to cook for himself. Gaines suggested that single men needed a program to teach them the basics. Reese told Allen and Mady he wanted them to produce it. The only question was who would host it.
Some food world experts he’d met were pushing Reese to find a place on TVFN for Jasper White, a chef who had been a central figure in a renaissance of Boston cuisine, winning the 1990 James Beard award as Best Chef in the Northeast. Jasper, thirty-nine, had a fleshy face, bushy hair, and a thick salt-and-pepper beard; he wasn’t particularly telegenic but was well known on the East Coast.
Allen began making the case for a different chef who had made numerous appearances on Cookin’ USA and who had just published a well-received cookbook. Emeril Lagasse had been named Best Chef in the Southeast by the James Beard Foundation in 1991 and Esquire magazine had just named NOLA, his second restaurant, Best New Restaurant. Allen had hoped to do a show featuring Emeril’s groundbreaking interpretations of Creole cuisine. His cookbook was full of fascinating recipes like Stir-Fry of Sesame Ginger Crawfish over Fried Pasta. But Reese was not offering a Creole show.
“Reese, I’m telling you, this guy Emeril Lagasse is terrific,” Allen argued, trying to get Emeril onto the network any way he could. “He has a twinkle in his eye. And this guy Jasper doesn’t.”
This was an argument among friends. Allen and Mady already knew they were going to produce the show no matter what—no one could make a food show as cheaply as they knew they could, so they stood by their guns. Reese dug in. “I’m not interested in Emeril. He’s okay, but he’s not good enough.” Reese did not think Emeril was appealing as a television personality, nor was he being chattered about in the New York media world. With a working-class Massachusetts accent seeming to turn every vowel into an “awww” sound, Emeril was not someone Reese would have hired to host a news program.
“He’s terrific!” Allen pushed.
“I don’t think so.”
Robin Connelly, the F.O.R., was sitting on the floor sorting videotapes as the dispute played out. Robin had watched the five-minute Emeril tape Allen and Mady had screened for Reese. Emeril, thirty-three, had a thick head of dark hair, a trim waist for a chef, expressive eyebrows, and his working-class Fall River accent, rather than being unappealing, could also be described as a sweet growl—manly, inviting, and shy at the same time.
Reese shouted over his desk to Robin, “Well, what do you think of this guy?”
“He’s a hunk,” she said. Robin was young and, more important, Robin was female and not a jaded television veteran. Reese thought the main audience for TVFN was going to be females aged twenty-five to fifty-four. Females will tune in to watch hunks. Even a newsman knows that.
Reese turned his attention back to Allen. “Okay, we’ll choose Emeril.”
—
Many of those who would be drawn to cook on television could trace their motivational fires to family dramas in childhood—wanting to put things right by producing something perfect in the kitchen. But a rare few seemed to have been born with the pilot li
ght lit. Emeril was one of those. Born in Fall River, Massachusetts, Emeril began helping his mother, Hilda, put vegetables into her homemade soup when he was five years old. As he grew, she gave Emeril the daily job of going to the local Portuguese bakery for bread. At ten, entranced by the aromas, he talked them into giving him a job. He was paid a dollar an hour and worked four hours after school every day washing pans and being taught how to make muffins and bread. Even when he followed another passion and became an accomplished drummer in his teens, cooking won out over music. Offered a full scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music, he turned it down, opting to pay his own way through the two-year culinary program at Johnson & Wales. His mother was upset, but his father, a security guard at a local mill and a garment dyer, said, “Emeril, if you think that this is something you love, which obviously you do, and if you think this is a way you can get a ticket out of here, then you go for it.”
He graduated, and spent years improving his craft at restaurants in France and then in the States, before being hired in 1982 to replace the renowned Chef Paul Prudhomme at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans. There Emeril made his mark, becoming identified more with the Louisiana city than with his New England birthplace. He had not done it simply to win a ticket out, as his father had said. For Emeril, his decisions were a matter of ruthlessly following his gut. He would act impulsively because he trusted his instincts. And neither they nor the people he hired to help execute his plans had yet failed him.
In 1990, he opened his own restaurant, Emeril’s, in a derelict warehouse district in New Orleans. On a night in February 1991, his intuitive genius was on display when he learned that Julia Child was coming to dinner. His week had already been tough because the annual national conference of the IACP was being held in New Orleans, and Emeril’s was the hottest dining spot in town, a must-visit for food world dignitaries. Rumor had reached Emeril that Julia was seeking talent to appear on a new series she was planning for PBS called Cooking with Master Chefs. He thought that if he could earn a turn on Julia’s show, it would help promote his restaurant and New Orleans cuisine. But, as he prepared to address his staff during the nightly pre-dinner meeting, he saw tired faces looking back at him. This was not the spirit a visit from Julia Child deserved.
He stopped talking about the menu. “Guys, this level of energy isn’t going to do it! You’re not tuned in. I think what we need to do right now”—he waved a beckoning arm as he starting to walk toward the front door—“Follow me.”
Improvising, he led the waiters outside the restaurant, a former pharmacy warehouse, as dusk was descending on Tchoupitoulas Street. He began to jog. Uneasy laughter broke out, but the staff followed him, giggling, and picked up the pace to a full-on run as they circumnavigated the block.
“All right,” Emeril said, as his laughing employees streamed back into the restaurant. “Now we’re ready for service. Let’s do it!”
Julia was won over by the bustling restaurant and the charismatic chef. In March 1993, just as Emeril’s first cookbook, Emeril’s New New Orleans Cooking, was coming out, a crew came to New Orleans to tape the premiere episode of Cooking with Master Chefs. Julia and Emeril prepared Shrimp Étouffée and boiled crawfish, pinching the cooked crustaceans at their ends to remove the meat. In later years, Emeril would boast, “I taught Julia Child how to suck head and pinch tail!”
—
A few days after Allen and Mady’s meeting with Reese in August 1993, Emeril was in his cluttered restaurant kitchen, having just finished a three-month tour promoting his first book. His instincts, and his willingness to trust those close to him, would be tested again. Marti Dalton, his business manager poked her head in.
“Em, there’s a call for you,” Marti said, “that TV producer.”
Emeril was tired from the book tour, but when he had shot an extra five minutes after his appearance on the Nashville Network, Allen had assured him he was working to get Emeril his own TV cooking series.
“Emeril,” Allen said, “this TV Food Network thing is actually going to happen and we’ve got the go-ahead to make a show with you.”
“Do I have to leave New Orleans?” Emeril asked.
“Well, you’d have to come to Nashville once in a while.” Allen explained the show, How to Boil Water. Emeril would teach everything from making sandwiches to how to slice a cucumber. “Easy,” Allen said.
“Gee, I don’t know,” Emeril said. “I’m going to teach people how to boil water? I’m going to show them how to make grilled cheese sandwiches?”
Allen agreed it was a strange fit, but encouraged Emeril, saying, “Hey, it’s a start. You’re going to be on television. It’s better than not. If you don’t do this, it will be Jasper White.”
“Let me think about it and get back to you,” Emeril said.
The episode of Cooking with Master Chefs in which he cooked with Julia was slated to run on PBS in October. Emeril talked over Allen’s offer with Marti. There was no guarantee that the appearance with Julia would lead to offers to do something more culinarily complex on television. How to Boil Water was a bird in the hand.
“You should do it,” Marti said. “It will help bring people to the restaurants.”
He followed the advice. “Okay, all right. I’ll give it a shot.”
He called Allen and accepted the offer. Over the next few days, Emeril and Marti spent what free time they had drawing up recipes and script ideas for the TVFN series.
—
Down in Nashville, Allen and Mady began working on three shows Reese had assigned them: How to Boil Water with Emeril, Food in a Flash starring Curtis Aikens, an expert on fruits and vegetables, and The Dessert Show with Debbi Fields, the founder of Mrs. Fields cookies.
Emeril would come to town for eight days and shoot sixty-five episodes of How to Boil Water, about eight a day and enough for TVFN to run a new episode every weekday for three months. Reese, following the model of a news channel, did not want reruns. On one episode, Emeril literally explained how to fill a pot with water, turn on the stove, and boil it.
On the day Emeril left town, Allen would take down the facings of the cabinets, move a few pieces around, put up different cabinet facings, and the next day start an eight-day cycle of shooting sixty-five episodes of The Dessert Show. Out Debbi went and, after a one-day changeover, Curtis Aikens arrived for his sixty-five episodes. Reid/Land was producing what must have been a record: 195 half-hour television episodes every thirty days.
“It was $50 a show or some crazy nonsense . . . I had to bring my own coffee, it was like—I remember staying at this place in Nashville, a really cheap hotel. It was ridiculous. That’s what it was.”
—EMERIL LAGASSE
Emeril had tried to tell himself it would be good for his personal development, almost meditative, to get back in touch with the basics like making egg salad and tuna fish. But he felt ridiculous doing it. When the first few episodes trickled up to New York, the TVFN staff were concerned. Emeril mumbled and was hunched over. He had a hard time remembering to look at the camera. But for the time being, they needed programming desperately, so the show went on.
—
There was less planning than reacting. Now a few shows were in production, and they were to be ready around the planned network debut, Thanksgiving week of 1993. But in late August, a big problem arose. November might be too late. After various court challenges and an evolving understanding of the new cable law, it became clear that if TVFN was not “a channel” putting out a signal by October 6, 1993, the retransmission consent agreements could be in legal jeopardy and everything might fall apart.
This time, Joe’s well of experience joined with Reese’s to save the day. Joe recalled when Colony Cablevision had applied for a license to become the cable operator for Fall River, Massachusetts, back in the 1970s. The man in charge of the effort, George Sisson, had promised local officials that the
cable system would offer more than twenty-five channels. “George, what are we going to have on these channels?” Joe had asked him.
“We’ll have to make some stuff up,” Sisson replied. Once the license was granted, they put up The Television Tuning Channel, which showed nothing but wide bars of color with an unwavering sound tone, and The Barker Channel, which ran a loop of promotional tapes from HBO and other fledgling pay services: “You must see Standing Room Only: Neil Sedaka!”
Joe suggested that TVFN could meet the October 6 deadline by starting out as a barker channel. Reese worried they would permanently lose the allegiance of anyone who happened to tune in, along with the allegiance of the cable providers who would have to put the dreck on their systems, but agreed there was little choice.
But could they be said to be officially broadcasting “a channel,” as their agreements called for, if all they were running was a short loop? They called Colony Cablevision’s lawyer in Washington, D.C. He’d never seen a legal definition of what a channel had to carry to be considered “a channel.” He told them he’d go over to the FCC and nose around quietly. “They’ll draw up a definition right away if they know what you’re up to,” he explained.
A few tense days passed and the lawyer called Joe and Reese. “There is none,” he said, giving them the good news. “Nothing says how many hours of original programming you have to have to be ‘a channel.’”
Reese knew a guy in Canton, Massachusetts, Barry Rosenthal, who had made a marketing video for Crimewatch Tonight. He immediately called him and asked if he could pull together a promotional video for a 24-hour network about food.
Barry idolized Reese as a cable pioneer. “Reese, if you’re launching the twenty-four-hour Poop Network, I’m in.” Despite Reese’s occasional tantrum, many of those who worked with him loved him and were fiercely loyal. His extreme personality gave him a depth of character those near him could tell stories about and bond over. Plus, he always remembered his friends. “When Reese works, we all work,” an F.O.R. said.