From Scratch

by Allen Salkin

  Now that Food Network was a Scripps property, the corporation’s head of distribution, Susan Packard, was out on the road trying to squeeze subscriber fees out of operators, promising, “We’re going to fix this thing, we’re going to make it a network you can be proud of.”

  But the network had not changed enough in the year or so Scripps had owned it, and Ken yearned to deliver results fast to quash skeptics. He started chumming with the talent, seeking to understand kitchen culture. This could be tougher work than it seemed. Drinking ouzo with Mario Batali into the wee hours yields regret upon waking. After a long night of wine and feasting at Emeril’s house in New Orleans during a Super Bowl weekend, Ken woke with a pounding headache while Emeril was already out doing morning television. But Ken was learning. And plans were made for new, better spaces for the headquarters and the kitchens in New York, even if they would be temporary.

  Ken’s ideas for the network began to collide with Eric’s. Eric had spent time prior to his Food stint working in Knoxville, but he was still far more a product of his two decades at CBS News, a sacrosanct division that corporate usually left alone. Scripps preferred to deal with the press carefully, routing reporters’ calls through its corporate public relations department. Eric, who seemed to know every journalist in New York, answered their calls directly and gave on-the-record quotes without corporate permission.

  Often when Eric did ask superiors for approval for a move he intended to make, he was not always gracious about it. In one case, Eric had an idea to buy broadcast rights for food-related movies, everything from Eating Raoul, a comedy about a couple trying to make money to open a restaurant by robbing and killing swingers, to Tom Jones, a period drama with a famously lusty feast scene. The movies would be hosted by one of Eric’s favorite Food Network personalities, David Rosengarten, who would cook a meal leading into and out of commercial breaks. All together, the show would take up a three-hour programming block on Sunday nights where ratings had been languishing. When Eric presented it to Ken and Ed Spray for a final sign-off, he considered it a mere formality. He explained that with good films, they could sell the commercial time at a premium. The rights were cheap and they could air the films as many times as Food Network wanted.

  Ed shook his head. “No.”

  Eric was flabbergasted. “Why wouldn’t we do this?” he asked roughly. “We could make money. It’s unique programming. What’s the downside?”

  Ken signaled to Ed who said, “It’s not the spirit of the Food Network to do movies,” explaining that this was not the vision Scripps had for its channels.

  Eric thought, “What the fuck is he saying?” and began to formulate a theory that Ed had it out for him personally. Before Scripps, Ed had worked at CBS News under Eric. But Eric had never promoted him to general manager of a local station, a coveted job, because Eric didn’t think Ed was leadership material. Eric found it infuriating that this former underling whom he’d viewed as a wimp now had power over him. After the meeting, he asked Ken, “What really happened there?”

  “Well,” Ken replied. “Ed really doesn’t believe in it.”

  Ed. What did Ed know?

  The Scripps team had been pressuring Eric to get rid of those who they thought would never mesh with their corporate culture. They did not like Heidi’s bawdy way of doing things—breasts and legs! Not Midwestern family-friendly! Nor, despite what they said to her face, were they enamored of Eileen Opatut, the head of programming, associating her with the wild pre-Scripps days and noting how ill at ease she’d been in Tennessee. She had not gotten into the spirit of the hootenanny. But Eric refused to let either of them go.

  With HGTV edging into the black, Ken steered the company’s money behind Food. In 2000, Scripps planned a 30 percent increase in spending on the network. Eric had been a great choice to mollify the troops at 1177 Avenue of the Americas—a New Yorker who understood the energy of the place and allowed the creative people to experiment. But now his occasional surliness and go-it-alone attitude was leading those around Ken to think that Eric was in danger of violating something Ken shared with very few people outside Knoxville: the no-assholes rule. Ken did not want to work with people he defined as assholes—non-team players common in the media world who tried to make their marks by stepping on the backs of others in their ambitious scrambles. Ken tried not to hire them, and if one got in, he disposed of the offender quickly. Eric, who was secure with what he’d achieved in his career, was well liked by those below him, but those above him in Knoxville, while they did not think he violated the no-asshole rule, recognized that he saw himself as his own man, not a prized Scrippsian trait.

  There was a potential replacement waiting in the wings. Soon after Scripps bought Food Network, and as it was preparing to launch a spin- off to HGTV, the DIY Network, Ed had suggested that Ken hire his friend Judy Girard to consult on programming across Scripps’s existing and proposed cable channels. Judy had made her name as the top programming executive at Lifetime, where she was known for adept scheduling. She had helped develop the channel’s flagship original movies-of-the-week, though some TV critics derided them as “women-in-peril” films: the main character was always having her baby stolen or being stalked by a deranged ex-con who had seemed so nice on their first date.

  After she left Lifetime and then a telecom start-up, Judy took a break to consider her next step. She was taking a walk on the beach near her home in Los Angeles when Ken called and offered her a job working on Food’s programming. Ken’s pitch was that he was giving her the opportunity to be at the start of something big.

  Judy had just left two high-pressure jobs and wasn’t interested in eighty-hour weeks anymore. She told Ken she would maybe think about it.

  “Judy, you and I both know, if you pass on this, you’re never going to forgive yourself because you’re too interested. Go walk on the beach tonight and let’s talk tomorrow.”

  They both knew he’d set the hook. “I hate you,” Judy said. “I want this decision behind me.”

  “I’m not going to let you put it behind you,” Ken said.

  Ken told her she could start slow. She would not have to work long hours and could stay in Los Angeles. If she liked Scripps and they liked her, there might be more opportunities. She accepted, and became Scripps’s senior vice president of programming and content development in August 1998. After Judy consulted primarily on DIY for a year and got used to the culture—and did not seem to be an asshole—Ed asked her to move to New York to work full-time on Food as a programming and scheduling consultant.

  Ken explained to her that Food was not Lifetime. He thought Lifetime spoke down to women by appealing to their fears. There would be no women-in-peril nonsense at Food Network. It was certainly aimed at women, but it had to appeal to them the same way HGTV did, with dignity. “This is about grabbing women’s attention, and saying, ‘Hey, we get you.’ Okay?” Ken said. “There are certain things about Lifetime that don’t appeal to women. Being told that it’s a network for women doesn’t appeal to women.”

  That said, Food was not another HGTV either. Some New York sass was okay. “I want a completely separate brand here,” he instructed. “I want the graphics to look different. I want it to pop. But you’re gonna have to walk a little bit of a fine line here, Judy, because this is a Midwestern company.”

  Eric didn’t think he needed a consultant looking over his shoulder: He had Eileen and her growing programming team—Bruce Seidel, Bob Tuschman, Kathleen Finch, and others. Judy did have some ideas Eric agreed with—the Martha Stewart deal was her initiative—but she did not like David Rosengarten and didn’t think he was attractive or smooth enough for TV. “Why is he on the air?” she asked Eric more than once.

  “Because he’s smart and he’s interesting,” Eric responded.

  He came to view Judy as a corporate suck-up with strange habits. She chomped carrots compulsively like grizzled newspaper editors us
ed to work cigars. She had gone to a renowned Manhattan nutritionist complaining about having a lack of energy, and the doctor prescribed raw vegetable snacks, saying they would give her pep. Every pronouncement she made seemed to be punctuated by the “crunch!” of a vegetable.

  Otherwise, she had little love for food. At business lunches, she ordered a plain hamburger on a bun adorned only with ketchup.

  Eric also noticed how she punctuated certain statements by turning her palms up, as if signaling that she wanted to be inclusive. Eric had hired performance coaches for on-air reporters and he detected coaching in this gesture. It was all a show, he thought.

  Judy called Knoxville every single day. And in those calls, Ed would reveal to her his frustrations with Eric: He was spending money without permission, bucking personnel decisions, and yakking to the press. Eric believed too much in food news. His Food Network reminded Ed of Reese’s TVFN: CNN with stoves.

  Seeing the growing tension between Eric and Scripps, Heidi Diamond sensed changes on the horizon. She believed that her years of experience at cable starts-ups and her success at producing marketing miracles on almost no budget at Food entitled her to be considered for the top job at the network. Heidi found an opportunity to make her case to Ken, suggesting that if Eric left, she should be elevated.

  He told her he was open to the idea, but he knew he was not going to make that move. Judy was being eased into Scripps; Heidi never had a chance.

  —

  In January 2000, Ken was named president and chief operating officer of E.W. Scripps Co., the parent in Cincinnati. In just a few years, cable television revenues had grown from nearly nothing to 18 percent of E.W. Scripps’s revenues. His baby HGTV was in 61.7 million homes. Food had expanded into 47.3 million, its annual revenues were up 60 percent to $66.6 million, and it had become profitable a year earlier than Scripps had projected. Even with the success, Ken knew he would have less time for day-to-day involvement in Food Network and wanted to make sure it was in trustworthy hands. Eric had brought order to the chaos, but now it was time to install a true loyalist at the top. Ken felt that Judy understood his thinking so well she completed his sentences.

  On Eric’s last day, Ken asked him to come to the network-wide meeting where they would announce that Judy was being put in charge. Eric refused. He knew that people he had protected would be fired, and he didn’t want to smile and pretend he liked it.

  “Make up whatever bullshit you want,” he told Ken, “But I don’t want to be there. That would be endorsing her, and I’m not going to endorse her.”

  When Judy heard Eric was not coming, she went to his office and told him she was sorry about how it had all played out.

  “If the only way I’m going to keep a job is kissing ass, I don’t want to keep the job. Life’s too short. If you don’t like it, fire me. But don’t be unhappy because I don’t call you every day with gossip.”

  —ERIC OBER

  “You reap what you sow,” he said.

  Before he left Food Network headquarters on his last evening, Eric dropped an autographed photo of himself on each desk as if to say, “Remember me. Remember when times were good.”

  —

  Through the changes of the first seven years, one show had held on, the news broadcast first called Food News and Views and later In Food Today, airing in 2000 daily at 5:30 p.m. When Bob Tuschman came in as producer, he had lightened the show; policy debates on farm subsidies were out; “A Salute to American Food” was in. A chef showed Donna Hanover how to skewer a corn dog with a chopstick.

  Offstage, Donna’s marriage was disintegrating in very public fashion. The city’s tabloid newspapers were filled with gossip suggesting that her husband, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was having an affair with his director of communications, Cristyne Lategano. In May 1999, Lategano resigned from City Hall and later married a sportswriter. But Donna and Rudy’s problems persisted. One time network staff heard Donna through the walls of a conference room screaming at Rudy on the phone. The makeup department learned to wait for the mother of two to stop crying before getting her ready for the cameras.

  In the spring of 2000, the mayor was spotted at public events with a new female companion he’d met at a cigar bar, Judith Nathan. It all famously exploded on Wednesday, May 10, 2000, when Mayor Giuliani, locked in a U.S. Senate race against Hillary Clinton and having revealed days earlier that he was being treated for prostate cancer, decided to come clean. At a press conference in Bryant Park, he announced that he and his wife were splitting: “I, um, this is very, very painful. For quite some time I, it’s probably been apparent that Donna and I lead, in many ways, independent and separate lives . . .”

  Donna was unprepared for the announcement. When the press showed up at Food, Heidi Diamond snuck her out a side entrance. Outside Gracie Mansion, Donna gathered herself enough to tell the press, “Beginning last May, I made a major effort to bring us back together. Rudy and I reestablished some of our personal intimacy through the fall. At that point he chose another path . . .”

  One day, Susannah Eaton-Ryan found her crying in a hallway. “I’m really sorry,” Donna said. “I really cared about my marriage and this is very hard for me.”

  But Donna’s public divorce did not doom the show. Rather, it was done in by Judy’s dislike of it and of cohost David Rosengarten. Just before Eric Ober left Food, he had told David, “You have a Judy problem.”

  He also had an Eileen Opatut problem. She was doing her best to see eye-to-eye with her new boss. Eileen called David “the thespian” when she’d see him around the network—“Oh! It’s the thespian!” She’d never been a fan of Taste. David tried a lot of wacky gimmicks, none of which were to Eileen’s taste. In the final segment of a show he once did about California salads, he sat at a table eating a Cobb salad and wearing sunglasses as the production staff shook the whole set to simulate an earthquake until it came crashing down. She also thought that In Food Today was looking increasingly chintzy, and did not see the point of spending to improve a 5:30 p.m. show when she could invest in prime time instead.

  David remained convinced that he was part of the bedrock of the channel. He decided to use his proven charms to win Judy over—food and schmooze. David managed to entice her to lunch at Estiatorio Milos, a fancy Greek place in Midtown where the Mediterranean scent of fresh crusty bread, grilled fish, and lamb usually soothed the most cantankerous soul. It didn’t do much for Judy. David started talking about ideas he had for new shows.

  “You know,” Judy said after listening for a spell, “you seem obsessed with having a TV show.”

  “I’m not obsessed,” David said, flummoxed. “This is what I’ve been doing for the last seven or eight years of my life. I just want to discuss with you the—”

  Judy cut him off: “Why are you always talking about shows? You should think about something else sometime.”

  David stopped talking. This isn’t going well, he thought.

  —

  Judy and Eileen tried to ease David into the realization that his time at Food Network was coming to an end. But he did not want to take the hints—until a meeting was scheduled for him with Judy, Eileen, and Bob Tuschman. Nervous and wanting to be prepared, he went into Bob’s office the day before. “What’s this meeting about tomorrow?” David asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think they just want to talk about the future of the show.” Bob may not have agreed with Judy that David could not work on television, but he did agree that the era of high-falutin’ food talk aimed at a narrow audience was coming to a close. He and other newer executives at Food Network were extolling “accessible” programming like Iron Chef and Emeril Live, hits that worked the trick of making food shows palatable to a broad audience who might never make their own chocolate mousse.

  David well knew that Emeril was king, and he had been warned by Eric and all but told by Judy that his days were numbered,
but his ego was impregnable. Taste was not in a cycle of production at the time, but David had been the dependable in-house go-to man for everything since the moment the network flickered to life on November 23, 1993. Seven years of good luck and high status in the food world he loved had followed.

  “Uh-huh,” David replied, “you sure that I’m not walking into a mugging here?”

  “No! No, no! It’s not a mugging,” Bob assured him.

  David didn’t entirely trust him and figured he would adapt, simply finding an idea for an “accessible” show—perhaps a spin on Taste as he’d done a few years earlier with Taste of the Orient.

  The next day at the meeting, Judy got to the point. “We’re going to cancel In Food Today.”

  David pivoted. “Okay! Well, that’s fine, because I’ve got a couple of other shows that I’m really eager to work on and talk over—” Eileen broke in. “No, no, no. I don’t think you understand. We’re actually not going to work with you anymore.”

  David looked at Bob, who was staring at a corner of the room. Judy was the boss, and he and Eileen both wanted to survive in the new regime. They had been around the TV business long enough to know that cancellations are always hard to break to the talent, but every show ends. There was nothing anyone could have said to make things any easier for David. Better to look away as the killing cut was made.

  Donna, however, understood more about the business, and had sensed for months that the show might be on the way out. In the midst of dealing with her dying marriage, she had been pursuing other options, doing guest stints as a morning host on local channel 5’s Good Day New York and talking with production companies. Eventually, she landed a gig hosting an A&E design show, House Beautiful.

  David did not land another show. He met with Erica Gruen, who sympathized with how unfair it was. “What a crazy thing in the TV business,” she said, “to build somebody up for seven years and then just cancel the franchise.”