by Allen Salkin
The network prep kitchens, which did, at least, have ovens, would have the finished dish ready to swap in and pull out of the fake under-cabinet oven—another foot stamp—when the time was right. Mario seemed to understand naturally how to make something fake look real.
And, as time went on, he started using on camera the erudition he exhibited around the 2 a.m. table at Blue Ribbon restaurant, explaining that Italian cooking had little to do with meatballs. He would salt in European history lessons, climatology, and linguistics. Molto Mario became a thinking woman’s, and, unusually, man’s cooking show with food that inspired wanderlust.
“Pat didn’t give me a lot of direction, but she kind of let me do whatever I wanted. When I’d get up in the morning and look at the recipes that I had already submitted to make, I said, ‘What am I gonna talk about besides the actual technique?’ Here I am slicing garlic, here I am roasting onions, here I am baking potatoes. I realized that what was important at that point was discussing the regional variations. Because there’s twenty great regions in Italy and each one of them is different, there’s really no Italian cuisine. And that’s what happened. So I decided, every time I made a dish as opposed to just merely talking about the slice, the dice, and the actual dump and stir, I really needed to talk about why Basilicata was different from Calabria.”
—MARIO BATALI
Rinky-dink as it was, Molto Mario was groundbreaking stuff, but there was a big problem: almost no one in the city where Bobby and Mario lived and worked could dependably see TVFN. And if the advertising community on Madison Avenue couldn’t see what they were buying, the chances of the network’s thriving were slim. That Reese was deeply engaged in trying to solve this problem, calling everyone he knew in government and media looking for a way to leverage Time Warner Cable, was another reason Tryg and, to a lesser extent, Jack continued to support him.
Time Warner Cable, which owned franchises in Manhattan and northern New Jersey, was not entirely ignoring TVFN. It was legally required to carry a New Jersey public broadcasting channel, WNJN, which it put on Channel 50. WNJN was rarely on twenty-four hours a day—it usually broadcasted from about 3 p.m. until midnight—so, at launch, Time Warner put TVFN on its unused hours.
Then in February 1994, Time Warner yanked the little-watched Nostalgia Channel and opened up Channel 54 to TVFN. This blissful state was only to last five months. NBC was launching a cable channel and using all of its must-carry leverage to pry open space. On July 4, the NBC cable channel America’s Talking (eventually to become MSNBC) debuted and took over 54.
“Channel 54, where are you?” became a bitter joke around the TVFN headquarters.
—
Until the network could get on more solid financial footing, the programming budget would continue at starvation levels. To Reese, this was the plan: get the network to the point where it was earning a few pennies more in advertising than it was spending in operating costs, use those pennies to slowly pay off the original investment and start funneling profits to principals (like him), and only then direct significantly more money into programming. Meager losses on the way to that goal were sufferable, but big losses had to be avoided, lest they goad investors to pull the plug.
Under those circumstances, relying on talent like Mario and David Rosengarten to pull off the miracle of making decent television in nearly impossible circumstances was the main programming strategy. Trying to create a full-time food network in a skyscraper on a tiny budget continued to be a constant process of adaptive invention.
Michele Urvater hosted Feeding Your Family on $99 A Week. It was originally to be called “Feeding Your Family on $75 A Week,” but after it became apparent that that budget was too tight, Reese allowed for an extra $24. This was one budget he could raise without risking the survival of the network. Emily Rieger was a food producer for the show.
On March 12, 1996, an office e-mail was sent out:
To: All
From: Dinny Fitzpatrick
RE: Hanging Duck
There is a duck hanging from the ceiling on the $99 a Week set. The kitchen has placed it there in order to dry it out. Please do not touch, poke, or otherwise interfere with the duck, as it is appearing on a program this week. The duck will be removed from the studio tomorrow morning by Emily Rieger.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
—Dinny
Nothing had the unrelenting momentum and low budget of a live call-in show. But the network lacked a digital delay system, so the shows were truly live. One day on Recipe for Health, a chef was discussing the benefits of eating tuna.
HOST: “Let’s talk to Rudy. He’s been waiting to ask us a question about your dish. Hi, Rudy!”
RUDY: “I wanted to ask a question. Why the fat content—funny you should bring it up—why the fat content of canned tuna versus fresh tuna is so vastly different, and I notice when cooking tuna that you can usually compare the smell of tuna to pussy. What . . .”
Later in the same show, there was another caller, perhaps a friend of Rudy’s.
HOST: “Let’s get back to the phone now because we have Frank from New York waiting. Hi, Frank!”
FRANK: “Hi, how are you?”
HOST: “Great.”
FRANK: “I’m calling in relation to fat intake in the diet. I’ve been eating as fat-free as possible for about eight or nine years now, but lately I’ve been hearing things about the fact, the alleged fact, that you should have fat in your diet and that eating fat-free is really not a good thing and Bellllllllllllcccccch! Buh-elllll-cccchuhhhhhh.” [An impressively long burp with a slight delay in the center of it, the delay not long enough to intake breath, just a kind of quick hitch as if to flip a release and switch lungs to find booster capacity for the burp. The long release of gas did not end Frank’s call. He continued:] “Why are you cupping your . . .”
At that point, the control room cut Frank off.
“I think,” the host soldiered on, “I think we lost Frank.”
—
A bit much, but even those callers with their schtick and their blue jokes were very New York, embodying the city in its last days of public sleaze, just before Times Square and its old triple-X movie houses were Disneyfied.
The chefs in the prep kitchen on the thirty-first floor had to cook from 5 a.m. to midnight to keep up with the network’s unrelenting shooting schedule. Trying to save money, the network had not purchased commercial-grade ovens. On a regular basis, the oven doors would shatter from the heat, sending a cascade of broken safety glass to the floor, where it rested like a spray of black gravel.
One day Susan Stockton, helping run the kitchen, was preparing for an appearance by Julia Child on Robin Leach’s show. Susan was paddling a rough pastry dough in a very hot pan, precisely following the recipe so that the éclairs Julia was to pipe from a pastry bag would turn out properly.
But the vents above the stove did not ventilate. They simply sucked hot air from one place and pushed it into another. As she paddled, Susan noticed that hot air was blowing directly on the top of her head. She looked up. It wasn’t the vent. It was Julia, towering over her from behind, looking intently into the pan to make sure it was being prepared properly and breathing on the top of her head.
Robin’s floor producer rushed in to summon Julia.
“You have to get to the studio!” he said.
“Not until she’s done,” Julia replied, swatting him away and resuming her vigil at Susan’s back, breathing on her head until the dough was just so.
If Julia was the TVFN’s occasional fairy godmother, Robin was its dirty uncle. One night, a producer awaiting Robin’s arrival for a voice-over session was surprised to see him stroll in with a guest, a tall African-American woman, who was leaning on Robin’s arm, her body barely contained in a few swaths of black spandex. Robin, impatient to get back out on the town with his date, was swearing and com
plaining at the five-minute delay between his arrival and the start of taping.
“What a fucking joke this place is,” he slurred. “If you don’t get me set up, I’m fucking leaving.”
Understandably, not everyone wanted a show on TVFN. Scriptwriter Nora Ephron appeared on Talking Food with Donna Hanover and cooked her favorite tomato sauce. After the taping, Reese asked the writer of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle if she’d be interested in hosting her own regular cooking show.
“Absolutely not,” she said.
—
But others, enticed by what the network could be, were willing to try. In many cases, it took someone with food at the center of his or her life to give TVFN their all, someone like Sara Moulton. Her journey to the network had started many years before TVFN existed. One day in 1979, Sara, a year out of culinary school, found herself peeling a massive pile of hard-boiled eggs for a catering company in Boston. Her coworker mentioned that she had been volunteering as an assistant on Julia Child’s newest PBS cooking show. Sara, a small woman with a blond bob who grew up on a farm in western Massachusetts watching and worshipping Julia, asked if more volunteers were needed. The next day her colleague said she’d talked to Julia and that Sara should call her at home.
Julia, as always, answered the phone herself. “Oh, dearie,” Julia said. “I’ve heard sooo much about yoooo. Do you food style?” Julia’s longtime food stylist was away, she explained. And shooting was set to begin soon. Sara, who had little such experience, lied. “Yes, I’m really good,” she answered eagerly.
After a meeting the next day in Julia’s famous home kitchen in Cambridge, the stunned Sara was hired as the food stylist for Julia Child and More Company. Eventually, Sara moved to New York and was hired to assist Julia, off camera, for her frequent Good Morning America appearances. That led her to a job running Gourmet magazine’s kitchen. Along the way, she taught classes at a culinary school, but she always thought of herself as a behind-the-scenes person. She saw many celebrities backstage at Good Morning America with their entourages, private makeup people, agents, and egos. They blew through the set with noise, hair spray, and drama, all charm when the cameras were pointed at them, all dragons when they weren’t. People who craved the lights and the attention were nonsense. That wasn’t her, she thought. Then in 1994, a Good Morning America producer had the idea to do an on-air segment featuring Sara as the show’s “secret weapon.” She resisted at first, but it was just a one-off thing, and the hosts, Charlie Gibson and Joan Lunden, would talk her through it. Secret weapon Sara cooked as instructed and, with some surprise, thought, Well, that wasn’t too bad.
Coincidentally, a few weeks later Sara received a call from Sue Huffman, whom she knew from food-journalism circles, inviting her to lunch with Reese. At Larry Forgione’s restaurant, Reese and Sue told Sara they could use someone with her experience, but they were not sure what job was the best fit. Would she be willing to run the Food Network backstage kitchen? They could only offer her the gig on a freelance basis without benefits. That wouldn’t work. She was the main breadwinner in her family and Gourmet was giving her benefits.
“Well, would you like to be food editor?” Sue asked. Sara would oversee all recipes. Sue was desperate for a more rational approach to food prep and recipe testing at TVFN, but Reese had been resisting spending money on any such improvements. “Is that a desk job?” Sara asked. “Yes,” Sue responded.
“Then, no. I’m a chef. I work in the kitchen.”
Sara was the kind of person Reese wanted on board, a food expert with television experience and without an established television star’s salary expectations. Plus she had worked with the gold standard, Julia. Emeril had moved on from How to Boil Water, but Reese did not want to give up on the idea of a super-basic cooking show—America’s bachelors were desperate, he believed. If Emeril was the wrong fit, perhaps blond Sara would do as the host.
“Well,” Reese said. “How would you like to do some on-air?”
Until the Good Morning America segment a few days earlier, she would have laughed at them. But she’d liked it enough, and her friends had praised her for it, more than one telling her she looked “perky.” So she agreed to give it a shot. It was only a pilot. She showed up at the studio a few weeks later and, for the cameras, made an asparagus vinaigrette and sole meunière—the buttery dish that had famously turned Julia Child on to French cuisine.
But Sara was the opposite of perky this time. She was an unsmiling, leaden-faced wreck. For her Good Morning America segment, Charlie and Joan had coaxed her along, and the cameramen, all friends, were rooting for her. In the rickety TVFN studio, she was in front of strangers, and she panicked. When she held up a bunch of asparagus, her hands were shaking so badly, the tips looked like the head of an electric toothbrush. When it was finally over, she walked out thinking, Okay, I didn’t really want to do this anyway.
A year passed, during which Sara’s name was tossed around the network. She had been awful in her test for How to Boil Water, but so had Emeril. When Chef du Jour started up, Pat decided to give her another shot. Sara knew this was no disappearing pilot. The five episodes would go out on the air a week after she shot them. She decided to demonstrate recipes out of Gourmet, and convinced the magazine to foot the bill for a few days of television training.
A couple up in Montague, Massachusetts, Lou and Lisa Ekus, had become the go-to experts for training TV chefs. New York City expats, they left the city in 1982. Lisa, who worked in public relations for publishers, realized that many authors had no idea how to answer interview questions in a way that would make audiences fall in love with them and buy their books. Lou, a researcher in prosthetics and orthotics, who often spoke about his research at seminars, began giving Lisa’s clients tips on how to work around cameras, stay on message, smile, and connect with people. These informal phone calls grew into two-day workshops, tailored specifically to clients in the food world.
The Ekuses’ main message was, “You’re always selling the same thing. It’s not the book or the product. It’s yourself. Get people to fall in love with you.” Just how the Ekuses made their clients lovable depended on the client. Lou tried a few techniques to loosen her up: “Pretend you’re in front of the camera at Good Morning America rehearsing one of your guests”; “Pretend you’re just talking to the control room.”
She remained as unbending and humorless as dry spaghetti when he pointed a camera at her. This wasn’t going to work. Why would she want to tell the control room anything about food?
Lou clapped his hands. “Okay, this is ridiculous. There has to be a reason why you should be the next Julia Child.”
Sara, who believed Child to be a goddess, was livid: “There. Will. NEVER. Be. Another. Julia Child!”
Lou had trained Emeril and cookbook authors like Mollie Katzen and Lynne Rosetto Kasper. He wasn’t going to fail with this five-foot-nothing farm girl. “Well, okay,” he said, relenting. “Maybe you’re not going to be the next Julia Child. But there’s got to be a reason why you should be on TV.”
“That’s just it,” she said. “I shouldn’t be on TV.”
Lou was starting to break her down. Here was the kernel: Sara saw herself as a behind-the-scenes type, a quiet WASP, the same role she played in her marriage to a man in the music business. She earned the money and kept things on track. He got to play. This whole idea of being on TV was vulgar to her.
“I’m representing Gourmet, and Gourmet should be doing this,” she said. In her mind the ideas deserved attention, not the person pitching them.
“No,” Lou replied. “I’m not sure about that.” He stewed for a moment. “Come on!” He clapped again.
She thought hard. “Well, I’m a really good teacher,” she mused, thinking of the students she taught at Peter Kump’s culinary school in New York. An image formed in her mind. She was Saint Sara, the evangelist of food. She told Lou. He n
odded. She gathered herself. Yes. She could play that.
Sara did her turn on Chef du Jour and was chipper enough that Joe Langhan asked her to substitute for Michele Urvater on $99 A Week. Since Reese demanded there be no reruns from one day to the next, guest hosts were often needed. Sara did three episodes, two of them taped and one a live call-in show. Sara didn’t screw it up, and a few days after the taping, Joe, with his usual lack of flourish, called her and said, “We’d like you to do a show, a call-in show. Um, and it’s going to be nightly, Monday through Friday, an hour long, and it’s going to be live.”
Although she had reservations about spending less time with her family, Sara signed on. She could keep her day job and rush over to TVFN to shoot at night. Saint Sara’s mission would be done. The show, Cooking Live, debuted on April 2, 1996, and was shot on the In Food Today set. She was so short, they had to pull in a narrow riser behind the counter every night. Because both In Food Today and her show were live and ran back-to-back, there was only three to five minutes to turn over the set. Suddenly air time would arrive, and Sara would take live phone calls while cooking, listening to a producer in her earpiece giving commands, and worrying nearly every second about accidentally falling backward off the riser while holding a pot of boiling water.
She had to learn fast. As with Getting Healthy, there was no digital delay with which to censor the callers. Sara would demonstrate a meal and the calls would come piping in throughout the show. Most questions were blandly informational—the ever-popular “How do you keep the skin crisp on a roast chicken?” among them. But there were profane ones, too, most of them failing to reach even the low bar set by Rudy and Frank—but, in their own sick way, revealing that some male viewers found Saint Sara’s no-nonsense kitchen attitude kind of sexy. She was approachable in a way Debbi Fields was not. On a show in her first week, Sara was making eggplant rollatini and a man named Ralph called and asked, “How do you make eggplant à la penis?”