by Allen Salkin
Sold, Marcus replied, “We’re going to get this network on the air.”
“Chefs Are the New Rock Stars”
A television channel, no matter how small-time, creates opportunities. Even a new local public access channel means that some frustrated artist may find an outlet—and perhaps an audience.
TVFN was far more than a local public access channel. At launch it reached communities dotted throughout the nation: White Plains, New York; New Bedford, Massachusetts; Costa Mesa, California; Knoxville, Tennessee. A variety of talents started showing up, some of them faded local celebrities just wanting to see themselves back on television again, others with stunningly farsighted visions of what might be made with this squalid little start-up.
For now, there was a thrown-together team tasked with meeting an unrelenting daily deadline amid balky equipment, general chaos, and the forceful insistence of the man in charge that everything would get done, damn the disbelievers. TVFN was running a few hours of original programming a day, repeating it up to six times. Many of the advertisements were of the low-rent variety: Ginsu Knives, Flowbee haircutting products, and other items available by ordering from a toll-free number.
Reese had long planned to add a restaurant review show to the schedule. To cohost this, he tapped one of those who were looking for a way back in front of the cameras. Bill Boggs was a veteran TV host with a locomotive jaw and dark blue eyes. Back in the 1980s, Boggs was doing daily television news in Philadelphia when he realized one afternoon that the Chippendales exotic dancer in a bow tie whom he was interviewing for a light midday news feature was probably the eighth Chippendales exotic dancer in a bow tie he had interviewed over his long years doing light features. Looking across at the shiny shaved chest, Boggs said to himself, “I’ve got to change what I’m doing.” He went on to help produce Morton Downey Jr.’s shock-mongering syndicated talk show in New York. After Downey was canceled in 1990, Bill, burned out, met a radio producer for a station in Greenwich, Connecticut, and on a lark, asked if he could do a talk show about food on Saturday afternoons. The producer agreed, and Boggs, unpaid, was soon doing phone interviews with celebrities like Dizzy Gillespie, Dick Clark, and Ed McMahon, asking each a question he had honed to get them talking: “What was your dinner table like when you were ten years old?”
Boggs, who loved to tell stories about himself, would refer to his practice of asking every interviewee the same thing as using his “signature questions.” Radio was a taste of the attention he needed, but television was what he craved. Without it, he felt like nobody special. Boggs managed to land a meeting with Reese and, with his news background and celebrity connections, he won a recurring slot on Food News and Views, delivering food-related gossip for a segment called “The Daily Dish.” Boggs would scan the tabloid newspapers, pluck out items, and then rewrite them to read on TV. A great day for him was when he revealed that Bill Clinton on the campaign trail had shaken hundreds of hands and then was so hungry that he’d eaten pie with his unwashed fingers.
When Reese was ready to add the restaurant review show to the schedule, he cast Boggs. It was originally called Eating Out, until Reese realized that the phrase’s double entendre made people giggle. After a few months, the name was changed to Dining Out and then to TV Dinners.
Boggs’s cohost was another at-sea talent drawn to TVFN. Nina Griscom was a thirty-something Manhattan socialite, tall, blond, thin, and married to her third husband, a Park Avenue plastic surgeon. She had finished a stint on a little-remembered HBO entertainment news show and her lawyer, a friend of Reese (F.O.R.), connected Nina with TVFN. She told Reese she was qualified for a restaurant review show because she had a knowledge of cuisine won from a lifetime of cooking and eating. That plus her good looks, on-camera experience, and social connections was enough for him.
Nina would arrive at the network for a day of taping that started at 6 a.m., and she would always take note of the seedy dressing room, the sofa split with cigarette burns, and the makeup table scattered with powders and creams that Nina’s practiced eye recognized as cheap crap. But she persevered. They taped five shows a day, a week’s worth, and reviewed three restaurants from around the country in each. There was little actual eating out. The network could not afford to send Bill and Nina to every restaurant they were reviewing, especially not to the Western states. Restaurants would ship their best dishes to TVFN by overnight mail, where they would be refrigerated and warmed up in time for the cohosts to sample on camera. A chef’s signature charred veal chop might arrive from its cross-country journey and wait in the refrigerator for up to a week. Fifteen plates of food would be set out in the morning in the kitchen, and if the week-old veal chop was on an episode being taped in the afternoon, it might sit for six hours in the open—by then one of the most well-worn veal chops ever to appear on national television. The hosts tried to prepare and speak knowledgeably about a dish by reading local reviews of each restaurant, but it could be tough to focus as they sat across from each other at a rickety-looking table with a tired piece of meat between them. As Boggs remembered: “I would say—we’re looking at this veal chop—‘Nina, what, what do you think of this, it’s a special of the house, Joe’s veal chop.’ ‘Well, I don’t know, Bill, why don’t you describe it?’ ‘No, you do it.’ ‘You.’ ‘Well, Nina, you know, I’ve never really seen a veal chop that looks exactly like that.’ And the reason being, there are spores like growing from the bottom of the veal chop. ‘And the wasabi mayonnaise, I’ve never seen one quite so green.’”
No matter how few people were watching, TVFN was show business, and Nina and Bill felt like stars. To the best of their abilities, and despite the unappealing format, they were spreading the word about the world of fine food to the cable customers receiving the channel in 1994.
David Rosengarten was managing to get a food-forward message across on Taste. A young New York Times reporter, Sarah Jay, singled out the show for praise, noting that “Mr. Rosengarten has reconceived the idea of what a cooking show can be.” On one episode, David prepared oysters, making sure to discuss their aphrodisiacal qualities. He had suggested to his producer, Josh White, that they backlight the scene with swirling purple light. As David ate, jazz music began to play and the lighting changed, his feathered blond hair silhouetted against an orgiastically dark violet hue, which pulsed like a giant amoeba in mitosis.
The day after it aired, Reese called Josh and David to his office. “What the fuck!” he screamed at them. “How did you put a purple fucking blob on my network?” This network was aimed at housewives, the audience he and George Babick had been promising they’d deliver to advertisers, and Reese didn’t believe that housewives wanted gyrating purple blobs and cheap titillation.
Cowed, Josh and David promised to play it straighter in the future. David also had run-ins with Sue Huffman. To him, the head of programming was a legend in her own mind, prattling on about her days interviewing chefs for the newspaper in St. Louis and reminiscing about editing the food coverage of Ladies’ Home Journal, which David considered a bible for philistines interested in preparing Jell-O molds with canned fruit and marshmallows. But Sue had power. She had helped deliver Julia Child to Reese. Not long after the oyster episode, David was making final preparations for a show about how to tell a good chocolate mousse from a bad one, and was getting ready to demonstrate the best way to achieve the proper light, airy texture: well-whipped egg whites.
Sue sidled up to the counter and asked him, “Are you going to use raw egg whites in this mousse?”
“Yes, we are!” David replied, as brightly as he could through his teeth. “It’s what gives it its lightness and its airiness.”
“Well,” she said, avoiding looking any of the production staff in the eye, “you’re going to have to change that, because we’ve decided that there’ll be no more raw egg on this network.” Sue, who eventually became president of the IACP, was not the ignoramus David believed and well kn
ew that egg whites were necessary, but she was following dictates from above.
“Ah . . . why?” David asked gently, as if he were speaking to an infant. The episode had been on the slate for a month, and she was weighing in now?
“Well, we just, you know, we’re afraid of the liability. Raw eggs, there was a report on Dateline. Salmonella. We don’t want anyone to get sick and sue us.”
“But . . .” Josh tried to protest.
“So take out the raw egg.”
Sue had the force of Reese behind her. As she left the set, the backstage kitchen staff decided that the only choice was to make the mousse out of whipped cream. During the short segment break, David spooned the unmousselike mousse into its glass, then eight people rushed forward and punched holes in the brown mass with toothpicks, hoping to create the illusion that there was air in it.
Sue, in turn, was intimidated by Reese. When the new kitchens were being designed, Reese had walked in on her showing architectural plans for the whole floor to a designer, far more information than he wanted exposed to a non-employee. “I don’t want him to see the plans,” Reese yelled, then ripped the papers out of the designer’s hands, threw them on the floor, and jumped up and down on them until his point was made.
Despite the fuddy-duddies, there was fun to be had on the air and behind the scenes. The producers of Food News and Views had managed to entice Jeff Smith to sit for an interview and oversee a cooking demonstration by his assistant Craig. Smith was drinking a lot of clear liquid from a water glass. “Jeff, you know, it seems that you and Craig get along extremely well,” David began. “That’s how it always appears on camera, but there must be times when you disagree about things?”
The Frugal Gourmet said, “Oh, no, no, no. That never happens. Craig has a very talented tongue.”
David looked right into the camera and held the glance for a beat, a classic TV comedian take.
For all David’s vamping, Food News and Views brought the region’s important chefs and food thinkers through the studios, a daily reminder to both viewers and visitors that this network really did see food as something that could be serious, funny, beautiful, and culturally and economically important.
Also helping the network establish that it was treating food as a subject both important and enjoyable was the inimitable Julia, with her every-month-or-so appearances on Food News and Views. She arrived like a fairy godmother, spreading her credibility like pixie dust. Of course she was by this time no longer a pixie. Sometimes getting the septuagenarian ready for her appearances could be a challenge. One time, as makeup artist Keira Karlin was smoothing foundation onto her face, Julia began nodding out, while holding on to a bag of McDonald’s french fries.
“Ms. Child,” Keira said, trying to keep her awake.
“Oh yes, yes, I’m sorry,” Julia said, recovering briefly.
But after a few moments, the pull of a pre-show siesta overwhelmed the great star and she began slumping farther and farther over in the chair. Keira gamely soldiered on, getting the makeup in place with pads and Q-tips as Julia drifted off. Even while she slept, Julia never released her grip on the fries.
Julia was the queen of TV food personalities, but one of the biggest new stars of this first period of the network was Debbi Fields. Her series, The Dessert Show, had been brought to Reese by Allen Reid and Mady Land. The founder of Mrs. Fields cookies was an impressive businesswoman, who had also authored a number of cookbooks, and who came with built-in name recognition. She was certainly smarter than her on-screen persona as a kind of dazed blond housewife. At her company, Debbi had pioneered the use of computers to streamline production across a national food chain.
But among the young backstage staff in New York, it became sport to ridicule Debbi for her long fire-engine-red fingernails, gigantically blown-out hair, and relentless good cheer. On one episode, she didn’t even try to pronounce her recipe for Bananas l’Orange correctly: “Bananas LUH Orange—and I know I may not say Luh Orange properly, but it really does taste good!” Justin Morris, a staff editor, created a Debbi blooper reel, highlighted by an episode in which she had chocolate all over her fingers and uttered, “I loooove chocolate.” Justin slowed it down to quarter speed so it came out as “luuuurvvvve chooooooooo cccccolate” and dissolved into a slow shot of Debbi licking her fingers. The young staff laughed over it for a half hour.
The more seasoned minds at the network recognized an opportunity when mail started arriving in which viewers asked, “How does she cook with those fingernails?” They were distracted by her talons, which skewered and ruined rolled-out piecrusts, and trapped dough underneath. Instead of defending her, the network developed one of its first promotional campaigns around it. Print ads showed a photo of her and her hands and asked underneath, “How does Mrs. Fields cook with those fingernails?”
Emeril was attracting far less attention. He certainly could have correctly pronounced l’orange, but French was not required of him, and he was awful on How to Boil Water. This was not Allen and Mady’s fault. The Nashville producers had tried to talk Reese into using Emeril on a more complex cooking show. After a few months, Reese decided he did see TV potential in Emeril, but thought the chef still lacked the on-air strength of personality to hold an audience on his own. Reese called Emeril from New York and said, “We’ve got good news and we’ve got bad news.”
“Okay, give me the good news,” Emeril said from New Orleans.
“Good news is, Emeril, we think you’ve got potential to be on television.”
“Cool.”
“Bad news is you’re fired. You’re overqualified for How to Boil Water.”
“Oh,” Emeril replied. “Uh, great.”
They tried a second show, Emeril and Friends, where he cooked with guest chefs, making their recipes and being asked to closely follow a script. But the Creole specialist not cooking Creole food was still straitjacketed and stiff.
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Reese’s wife, Pat, had found a suitable home for TVFN. The network signed a lease for the vacant thirty-first floor at 1177 Sixth Avenue, a building on the edge of Rockefeller Center, and set about remodeling. Pat’s lack of familiarity with what cooks actually required quickly became evident after the network moved in the spring of 1994. Chefs and the kitchen staff complained that the stoves were electric, which chefs hate because the heat can’t be controlled as precisely as gas, and the on-set sinks did not have proper plumbing. For running water, they illegally tapped into the sprinkler system. Under the counter, the sinks emptied directly into slop buckets, which production assistants toted out between takes.
The studio had a main set with steel lettering over it that read: Kitchen Central. Smaller sets around it were so flimsily assembled that the production assistants had to stand behind them and hold them up during taping. But at least there was now a studio equipped to produce some real cooking shows, complete with a somewhat more proper backstage kitchen where food could be prepped. Also, mornings and late nights around Rockefeller Center were generally free of prostitutes.
Reese made most of his decisions on the fly, walking through the halls, quickly issuing orders to whoever was standing closest to him. But he took his time figuring out what to do with Emeril. He had come to see Emeril as worth keeping because Sue Huffman had joined the chorus insisting Emeril had too much culinary talent to be squandered. Reese finally accepted that asking the chef to plod through prepared scripts and other chefs’ recipes was folly. He came up with a name for a new program, Essence of Emeril—like any fan of newspapers, Reese loved alliteration. He flew down to New Orleans and explained that the chef would be allowed to cook his own recipes and not be scripted. In August 1994, Essence of Emeril began taping at the new studios in New York. “The whole network smells like a giant shrimp cocktail!” Emeril improvised enthusiastically on an early episode, turning the studio’s lack of ventilation into a good thing. Measured by the nu
mber of recipe requests the network was receiving, Essence soon became one of the network’s most popular shows. At the end of every show was a mailing address to which viewers could write requests for recipes.
But the bizarre combination of worlds Reese had forged generated unusual friction. One day on the set, Susan Stockton, a trained chef who helped run the backstage kitchen, put out a beautiful fresh snapper. Emeril said, “I love it.” But Pat, filling in as producer, barked into Susan’s headset, “No food with faces!” Pat was squeamish. Susan was forced to chop lemons and place them over the fish’s eyes. One time, a guest chef wanted to make a quail dish with pine nuts and grape relish, but Pat told her tartly, “We’re not doing little birds right now.”
There were also sweet little moments. Marion Cunningham, the author of the influential revision of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, made around sixty-five episodes of a homey show called Cunningham & Company. She invited prominent guests like legendary cookbook editor Judith Jones and restaurant consultant Clark Wolf to chat at a kitchen counter about their favorite dishes, cook a bit, and, in the final segment, sit around a table eating and chatting more. When restaurant critic Ruth Reichl did not want to blow her anonymity on the show, Reese bought her a red wig, which she wore to go undercover for years after. Trying to put Marion at ease on camera, the production staff taped a photo of her dog, Rover, onto the main camera. Instead of saying “Action!” the director barked “Woof!” when it was time to start.
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It was haphazard. Hosts were cast based on who happened to show up in Reese’s office on a certain day, who could recognize a tally light, and who came recommended by an F.O.R. In some ways it was not so different from a public access channel. And yet when Shep Gordon, a Hollywood agent and movie producer who was obsessed with the artistry of chefs, read an article about what was happening at the dingy TVFN studios in New York, he instantly recognized a chance to make a rewarding marriage he had long envisioned.