by Allen Salkin
Erica resisted all entreaties, even from Jack, who came down from Providence. But he did not oust her, and the office decoration went ahead as planned.
Jack heard the grumbling, but ProJo was preparing to go public with an IPO, and he did not need turmoil at the top of Food Network.
—
By the time Erica arrived at the network, shoot day was near for the Emeril specials. She was worried and cautioned Joe: “You’re spending a lot of money on this. It better be worth it.”
“I don’t know if it’s worth it,” Joe replied, “but we’re obligated to Emeril to do it.”
The day before Emeril was due in New York for the live Real and Rustic show, he was in Hawaii making a promotional appearance and visiting Shep. After the long flight to New York, he was driven to the studio. As he stepped out of the car, he was shocked to see a long line of adults and children waiting on the sidewalk. A cheer went up for him and he felt his jet lag drain away.
Susan Stockton, heading the kitchen crew on the show, was among those worried that the children would yell and cry during the taping. She went up to the line outside the theater and asked people, “What possessed you to bring your kids with you?”
“They brought us,” one woman responded. Channel-surfing children, whose parents saw cooking as menial labor, had found the larger-than-life character on TV. The barrel-chested star of Essence of Emeril worked over fire, handled weird-looking critters, and used a knife with the kind of artistic swordplay seen in a Three Musketeers story. Emeril’s enthusiasm was irresistible. When TVFN ran ads looking for people to show up for the taping, the children demanded to go, just as children for centuries have begged their parents to see the traveling circus when it came to town.
The set was cheaply decorated with a fishing net strung up behind a countertop, a vintage Coca-Cola machine to one side, and a few jars of hot sauce on shelves. But no one was disappointed. When Emeril charged out, the audience screamed with glee and kept applauding as he took his spot behind a cutting board.
“Wooooo!” Emeril shouted back, soaking up the excitement. He grabbed the raw chicken in front of him, stood it up on its rear, and began using its drumsticks to clap along with the crowd, nodding and beaming wide.
“It was so over the top. People, they went crazy.”
—EMERIL
When Erica heard the audience’s hysteria, she felt chills. “Most television executives never actually see an audience. You get the Nielsen ratings. So this roar went up from the audience, and I just thought, ‘Oh, my God,’” she remembered. At Saatchi & Saatchi she had run its branded entertainment unit, a production arm that developed shows the company’s advertisers would want to buy time on. Erica would sell the shows to networks with the promise of presold advertising. The unit’s biggest success was What Every Baby Knows, starring pediatrician Berry Brazelton, who gave tips on raising infants. It ran in syndication on cable stations for years, providing advertising slots in which Procter & Gamble would tout diapers. Erica noticed that although the ratings were never sky-high, everywhere she went with Berry, his fans wanted his autograph. They wanted him to kiss their babies. They asked which pacifier he recommended. Erica realized ratings could matter less than usual if a show appealed to a focused demographic that advertisers wanted. Long before many others, Erica understood that someone could have this kind of narrow but valuable cable television fame without giant ratings.
As she stood in the Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! studio hearing the fans whoop with every “Bam!” Erica decided that Emeril could be the new Berry Brazelton.
—
Within days, Food Network’s top staff met to try to turn Emeril’s special into a regular series.
Befitting a program that was more like a concert than a studio show, the idea gained the name Emeril Live, even though it was not going to be broadcast live. Producing a cooking show with a live audience and a full backstage kitchen staff (which Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! did not need) in a studio outside 1177 Sixth Avenue was going to run about $50,000 a day. The baseline cost for shows shot at 1177 was $2,750 per half hour. Joe said that if they could do three hourlong episodes in each day of taping, you could figure the cost at around $9,000 per half hour. Still, that meant that 90 episodes of Emeril Live would cost $1.8 million, nearly a fifth of the network’s $11 million programming budget for 1997.
As optimistic as she was, Erica told Joe the network would be sticking its neck out by committing that kind of budget to one show.
“We never spent a lot of money on anything except the James Beard awards,” he argued. “We have to roll the dice with this. It is the best thing we’ve come up with, and Emeril is the most popular guy on the network. If we don’t come up with something new for him, some other network will.”
Emeril, delighted to work on the fly in front of an adoring audience cooking his own recipes, agreed to do three shows each taping day, and Erica, thinking of Brazelton, agreed to wager a big piece of the network on him.
Emeril Live, with a two-man band and an opening monologue, debuted on January 20, 1997, and it was a hit from the start, doubling the network’s ratings in its 8 p.m. slot.
Erica’s optimism returned when she gushed to Multichannel News in February 1997, “We’ve created a unique television form. It’s a cross between The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and a cooking show.”
As time wore on and the show’s success grew, who exactly the “we” was who created Emeril Live became a matter of dispute—success, they say, has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan. Years later, Emeril himself claimed the idea had come about in a meeting with Erica when he was complaining that he was bored of doing Essence of Emeril and was going to “retire” from doing cooking shows. “And then that’s when I suggested to them that with my music background and loving people, being with people, that we should do a live show,” he told me in a 2010 interview. “We should do a people show. And I expressed to them that you had Letterman, you had Leno, and there’s nobody in the cooking world that was doing that stuff.”
Among the many problems with this account is that Erica, not shy about claiming credit for successes on her watch, admits she was not at the network when the basic idea for the show was hatched. She says her contributions, not minor, were to exploit Emeril’s talent as a drummer by including the band and to further brand him as a big personality by insisting on an opening monologue. Jeff Wayne credits Joe for the basic format—Emeril cooking as a sort of concert in front of a live audience—as do Susannah Eaton-Ryan and others. It is certainly possible that a similar idea was brewing in Emeril’s mind because of his exuberant public appearances at the time, but no one at the network recalls hearing the thought before Joe put together the special. If, in the short time between the end of the Real and Rustic special and Emeril Live, Emeril pushed Erica for the band before it organically occurred to her, that is not how anyone chooses to remember it.
—
In any case, long before the bloom of success gave way to bickering over origins, an incident elsewhere blunted the initial Emeril Live high.
Around 6 a.m. on January 30, 1997, Susannah Eaton-Ryan, head of operations, was woken by a call from her overnight man. “You’re not going to believe this, Susannah. We have a real problem.”
She held the phone to her ear without lifting her head from the pillow. At CBGB, the punk club she’d managed in the 1980s, people had died of overdoses in the bathrooms. What could be so damn urgent? “Yeah. What now?”
“We showed porn on the air during Too Hot Tamales.”
Susannah sat up. Showing explicit sex on the air was a federal offense.
It happened, the overnight operations man explained, during the airing of a taped episode of Susan and Mary Sue’s show. The women had been preparing a dish that required tender slices of flank steak. “You’ve got to pound the meat,” one of them had instructed. At that moment the
tape had been sabotaged. It cut to a naked man and woman . . . pounding the meat.
The engineer had switched to the backup tape as quickly as he could. Food Network was at least professional enough at that point to have backup tapes lined up. Susannah had helped set up the system.
The backup tape had the identical scene of hard-core pornography on it. The engineer was powerless to stop it. For an entire minute—an eternity in TV time—an anatomical close-up of copulation streamed to TVs throughout the nation, Mary Sue offering an unintentional voiceover with instructions on the proper way to prepare meat the entire time, before the video returned to the regularly scheduled programming.
About an hour later, Erica called Mary Sue in Los Angeles, where it was 4 a.m. “Something inappropriate happened on your show.”
Mary Sue’s first thought was, Oh, my God, did I make an innocent racial slur or something? She asked Erica, “What happened?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” Erica replied, hoping that if the knowledge stayed contained, the problem might go away. “But if the press calls, you need to be on red alert.”
Mary Sue called Susan, panicked and rambling: “Erica called, I don’t know what the hell is wrong, but something bad happened on the show, and the FCC may be involved.”
That morning at the Border Grill, the business manager Andrea Uyeda came in shaken and asked Mary Sue and Susan, “Did you see the show?” She slid a tape into the video player in the office.
Mary Sue was far more familiar with preparing quesadillas than the intricacies of television production. Watching the pornographic snafu, she wondered, “Was there some cosmic wire crossing that caused us to get mixed up with the Playboy Channel?”
Meanwhile, FBI agents arrived at the network, grilling the employees who worked in the tape-editing room.
Those who were not at the office that day received personal visits from law enforcement. One staffer was swimming laps at the YMCA, came up for air at one end of the pool, and saw two pairs of black shoes standing there. “Get out of the pool,” said one agent. Another young, off-duty staffer heard a knock on his door.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Open up,” a voice said, “it’s the FBI.”
He let in two men in suits and they handed him their gold-embossed business cards, taking seats on the lawn chairs the lowly paid young man was using for furniture.
“Why did you do it?” an agent asked.
He would never do such a thing, the staffer explained in earnest. “I went to Brown.”
After ten minutes, they left. Despite the questioning of everyone at the network who had access to the broadcast tapes, the mystery of who had spliced in the porn was never solved, and no punishment was meted out against the network. Mary Sue and Susan decided the incident was actually pretty funny and ultimately a good thing. It had gotten people talking about Food Network.
Changing the Recipe
The longer Food Network could stay alive, the more chances it had to get lucky.
One day early in the run of Emeril Live, a television producer named Peter Gilbe tried to sell Joe Langhan a strange British show. Two Fat Ladies followed the journeys of a pair of eccentric, not-thin and not-young friends, Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright, as they bounced through the English countryside on an antique motorcycle and sidecar. The ladies were in search of farm-raised foods and drafty kitchens in castles and cathedrals where they would cook their versions of traditional British fare, deploying as much lard, anchovy, and breading as possible while keeping up a bawdy patter in the Queen’s English.
In one episode, Jennifer was preparing a pan for a sugar cake, and in a droll tone, instructed Clarissa on the proper application of butter to keep it from sticking. “Did you see Last Tango in Paris?” Jennifer asked, referring to the X-rated 1972 erotic drama starring Marlon Brando and its famous sex scene involving the lubricious qualities of butter. “Well, something like that.”
Jennifer, the elder, favored shapeless monochrome dresses and wore eyeglasses so giant they enclosed her face from her forehead nearly to the tops of her lips. Clarissa, the weightier, often wore flowery print tent dresses. Jennifer smoked and drank. Clarissa, a recovering alcoholic, did not.
Erica Gruen was eager to add more personality to the network. And if she wanted unusual, Two Fat Ladies fit the bill. Joe had shown Erica the tape Peter had sent him, and she was definitely interested. In some ways as traditional as tea, in others as weird as Monty Python, it was shot on film, slowly and expensively. Gilbe had filmed a dozen episodes—two seasons’ worth. Having already sold Food Network the rights to Ready . . . Set. . . Cook!, he pushed Joe for a big price for Two Fat Ladies. Peter wanted Food Network to buy the American broadcast rights and thereby help him afford a third season. “I can let you have this show if you’ll finance thirty percent of shooting more episodes,” Peter said.
“Well, what do you spend on ’em?” Joe asked.
“About a hundred and eighty thousand dollars an episode.”
Joe laughed. Peter wanted $360,000 from Food Network for the twelve episodes. Joe pointed to the newly built Emeril Live set. “Those shows out there cost us $18,000 each. For an hour. You’re asking us to spend, like, thirty thousand for a half hour. We just don’t have that kind of money.”
Although Peter over the next few months kept mentioning rival interest in the show from PBS, it turned out there were not a lot of American television venues vying to bid on a show about overweight English matrons prattling about and preparing breath-destroying dishes such as Onion Soup with Stilton. Eventually, Food Network bought broadcast rights to Two Fat Ladies for between $5,000 and $10,000 an episode.
The unusual name of the show began attracting media attention. Nearly every article about the upcoming cable season in 1997 that referred to Food Network made mention of Two Fat Ladies, and Clarissa and Jennifer came to New York to shoot promotional spots. Food Network rented them a vintage motorcycle and sidecar from a collector. Like the rock band Van Halen, which famously demanded green M&M’s in their dressing rooms, the Fat Ladies had certain requirements: Scotch whiskey must be stocked on the set, and smoking would be allowed indoors. The producers complied. But on the shoot day, they were nervous because the motorcycle appeared rather compact and Clarissa was not. “Is she going to fit in the sidecar?” the crew whispered as the shot was set up. Happily the younger of the fat ladies slid into the sidecar as snugly as a buttered spatchcock into a baking dish.
The pair visited the daytime talk show Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, cooking their version of pork stroganoff for the hosts: tenderloin, butter, gin, and sour cream. During commercial breaks, they took note of how voraciously Kathie Lee Gifford gobbled down a plate of it. A few days later in an interview with the Washington Post, they talked about her some more. “She certainly looks undernourished. . . . We were told that she has troubles at home . . . you know . . . with her husband,” Clarissa said, referring to football great Frank Gifford, who in the spring of 1997 had been recorded by the gossip newspaper The Globe being seduced by a former flight attendant in a hotel room. “Well, would you blame him? Nothing to get his hands on, poor man.”
“I took home screeners and watched them on the VCR with my husband. I said, ‘I don’t know. I can barely understand these women. I don’t know if this is going to go over . . . Plus the title, ‘two fat ladies,’ as I was told, is a bowling term in the UK for when you get double zeros, gutter balls. My husband said, ‘It’s hilarious. It will be fine.’”
—ERICA GRUEN
Outside Philadelphia, they stopped by the shopping channel QVC to promote the American edition of their first cookbook, Cooking with the Two Fat Ladies, and sold two thousand copies in ten minutes. That was nice. Less so was when Richard Simmons, the manic workout guru known for his ringlets of hair and terrifyingly silky shorts, rushed from the wings where he was waiting for his o
wn selling segment and embraced them in front of the cameras.
In the Post article, Jennifer said, “I thought he was a lunatic. He’s certainly unusual-looking.”
Clarissa added, “Well, I was very glad I was not likely to be an attraction for him. Imagine fighting that off!”
—
Erica also gave a new show to Bill Boggs. Around the Food Network office, Boggs’s narcissism was legend. One editor loved to tell the story of how Bill, a frequent name-dropper, came in to do a voice-over for a special and said to him, “You look just like Kevin Costner, and I know because I’ve met him.” A young production assistant had made T-shirts emblazoned with Bill’s face and wore one ironically around the office. Under the large head shot, it said simply “Bill Boggs.”
But Bill’s desperation to hobnob with the famous could be useful. Back when Bill had been at Channel 4 in New York, he’d interviewed Bill Cosby at one of Cosby’s favorite restaurants, Ennio & Michael in Greenwich Village, for a series of segments Bill called “Corner Table.” When the producers of In Food Today allowed him to bring these segments to Food Network, Boggs convinced Cosby to revisit the restaurant for another quick interview. Rochelle Brown, still a producer for the show, led the shoot. When it was done, she told Boggs, “You know, this could be a pilot.”
More Boggs sounded like a good idea to Boggs. The only problem was that the Cosby segment was too short, only about two and a half minutes. He needed a few additional minutes to demonstrate a half-hour show. Asking Cosby to show up again to make a pilot for the lowly Food Network was out of the question. Boggs studied the tape over and over, trying to figure out a way to stretch the two and a half minutes. Finally, he saw a solution. He bought a sweater the same color as Cosby’s, gave it to an African-American friend, and arranged to meet the Cosby stand-in at Ennio & Michael. He had a camera crew shoot the two of them from behind, so you could see an arm that looked like Cosby’s in the shot with Boggs as he nodded and made up his end of a mock conversation with Cosby. The camera shot the dishes of food as they came out. Artful editing, lingering food shots, narration from Boggs, and a lot of splicing eventually produced enough footage to make a usable pilot of Bill Boggs’s Corner Table.