by Allen Salkin
He believed he was defending the soul of the network against the dark forces arrayed around him, and he saw that soul as more than just a connection to food. In his experience the network was a place for experimenting and scoring big with avant-garde forms of television. One day in October 2000, Kathleen Finch, a programming executive, asked him to come to a meeting. He walked into a room, and Eileen, along with the head of human resources, confronted him about the expenses. They had tracked his e-mails and his unauthorized expense reports. The expenditures were not allowed, they said. He had broken company policy.
Matt tried to defend himself by arguing that he was meeting with people the network ought to know. But Eileen had had enough. His ideas and enthusiasm had made her look good and inspired her, but things had changed at the network. In the Scripps culture, Matt was making her look bad.
They told him they were firing him.
“Is there anything I can do to make it up, to keep my job?” he said through his tears.
“No,” they told him.
Matt had made the mistake of thinking the network had a fixed identity and tying himself to his idea of it. Facing reality burned.
—
With all the changes and the new conservatism, Food Network was delivering food knowledge to more people than ever. In 2000, foodtv.com soared past a million visitors a month. Mario was still cooking, as were Bobby and Emeril, all award-winning chefs. Jamie was making the profession hipper than ever. Marc Summers was showing the fun side of food. Cat Cora, Padma Lakshmi, and chefs like Michelle Bernstein, Ceci Carmichael, and Aarón Sánchez were showing its diversity on other shows throughout the schedule.
Judy had some successes in her first year, but Eric Ober’s “let’s give it a shot” attitude was what had allowed for the bold experimentation that led to Iron Chef and Good Eats. Bobby’s Webster Hall battle against Morimoto had been set in motion before Judy’s reign. The most significant thing she had done so far was to clear the decks, making space for something new.
Comfort Food
As Food Network approached its eighth birthday, it had fewer swashbucklers on staff to yank it in unexpected directions, but Scripps was investing in it, and Iron Chef was attracting heat. Chefs were sexy, and entertainment industry players were picking up the scent. One of them was Barry Weiner, who had started his career at the William Morris Agency in the late 1970s. After eight years there, he’d grown disillusioned. Convinced that his colleagues were more interested in flipping quick deals to earn commissions than in patiently nurturing their clients’ careers—an approach he believed would pay off bigger in the end—he set out on his own. Rather than competing in the fields that William Morris and other established agencies dominated, like news, prime-time television, and movies, he sought his own niche. The rise of gossip TV shows in the 1980s such as A Current Affair, Hard Copy, and Inside Edition offered a new form of lowbrow television that repelled some agents, but Barry swooped in. He began representing and socializing with a New York–based cabal of hard-drinking reporters and on-screen personalities made up of the Australians and Brits who worked for Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper and television empire: Steve Dunleavy, Neal Travis, Charlie Lachman, and Peter Brennan among them.
Barry and his business partner Jonathan Russo represented Robin Leach, and when Robin received his seven-figure payout at TVFN, they took their 10 percent cut. His next Food Network client was Gordon Elliott, who had his own afternoon talk show on CBS and had gained fame in New York City with his outrageous “Door Knock” features on the local Fox channel’s morning show. Gordon once brought more than a hundred members of the New York Choral Society to Bill Cosby’s apartment to function as a live alarm clock and wake the comedian. After The Gordon Elliott Show was canceled, Barry suggested they take the “Door Knock” concept to Food, and Door Knock Dinners was born. When Tyler Florence, who had appeared on Door Knock Dinners, was offered the $20,000 development deal from Food Network that led to Food 911, Gordon sent him to Barry: “He’s the greediest man in the business.”
—
Paula Deen, a Georgia restauranteur, had done a turn on Door Knock Dinners as well. For it, she, Gordon, and the TV crew had talked their way into a young housewife’s kitchen in Las Vegas, found chicken, ground beef, and tomato sauce, and Paula had turned it into a spaghetti casserole. Apple pie filling and canned refrigerator biscuits became fried apple pies.
After the shoot, Gordon and Paula had stayed up until 5 a.m. playing casino craps. When Gordon took her and her sons Bobby, twenty-nine, and Jamie, thirty-two, to the Las Vegas outpost of the renowned New York restaurant Le Cirque, the maître d’ had ordered them into jackets and ties and sent the boys to a wardrobe room. Gordon was charmed by her energy and wit. He wrangled Paula a turn as a competitor on Ready . . . Set . . Cook! and aimed to pitch Paula as the host of a cooking show on Food Network.
“Paula, you need representation,” Gordon said, not long after meeting her.
“Gordon, I wouldn’t know who in the world to call,” she replied in her Southern drawl—WHO in the whir-urrrld to caw-awl—“I don’t know anything about that stuff.”
In 1999, Gordon arranged for her and Barry to meet. Barry had a Jewish name and a hard-consonanted Bronx-Jewish accent, but he was of Chinese heritage and had been adopted by Jewish parents. When Paula met him, she exclaimed, “You don’t look like Barry Weiner!”
—
A decade earlier, Paula Deen, fifty-two, had rebuilt her life. After her father had died at forty following heart surgery and her mother at forty-four from cancer, she’d been beset by panic attacks. For years she had barely left her house. It was only in 1989, after she divorced her alcoholic husband, that Paula had found the strength to start a catering business (on $200 in savings) and eventually break her phobia. The business was called The Bag Lady. She would wake at 5 a.m. and make 250 meals in her kitchen—ham salad sandwiches, banana pudding, fruit salad—and her then-teenaged sons would deliver them to local businesses at lunchtime. That led her to open a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, called The Lady & Sons, which became a huge success. In 1997, she had self-published a cookbook featuring the not-entirely-wholesome recipes she served at The Lady & Sons, like fried chicken battered with egg and self-rising flour, and butter cakes made with Duncan Hines yellow cake mix, butter, cream cheese, and a box of powdered sugar. One day, Pamela Cannon, an editor at Random House who was visiting Savannah, ducked into Paula’s restaurant to escape a thunderstorm and noticed the cookbook. Random House paid Paula a $7,500 advance to publish a polished version of it and added a foreword from Savannah writer John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: “Ms. Deen is an irresistible example of that extraordinary phenomenon of Southern womanhood, the steel magnolia,” Berendt wrote. “She is always appealing and gracious but possessed of an unfailing survival instinct—a necessary trait for a Southern cook to make it.”
A vivacious, heavy-set former model with bouffant white hair and blue eyes, Paula had an inner will and energy most people don’t have at twenty-two. She could get people talking about anything one-on-one, and also could make an entire room laugh. Her family and friends had always said she was like Oprah Winfrey, but Paula had read Martha Stewart’s decorating and cookbooks in the late 1980s and was impressed at how seamlessly Martha’s business flowed from her life, how she’d turned her lifestyle into a business.
“I want to become the Martha Stewart of the South,” Paula Deen told Barry when they first met. “And I’ll work as hard as I need to to make that happen.” Paula was promoting her cookbook on QVC, and the two were having lunch at the Sheraton Great Valley Hotel in the suburbs outside Philadelphia, near the channel’s studios. Paula did not have a big team. Jamie and Bobby helped run the restaurant. Her public relations strategy consisted of walking the floor of the dining room every day speaking to customers.
“My parents died very young. My daddy was for
ty and my mother was forty-four. And there was nothing I could do for my parents. Nothing I could do for ’em. But the only thing that I could do, and this sounds crazy, but the only thing I could do was say they produced a winner. They did not produce a dud.”
—PAULA DEEN
Barry saw a sizzle in those steel-blue eyes and was charmed. He also was frustrated with his client Bob Vila, the home renovation star, who, Barry felt, was balking at cashing in big on his fame. In Paula, he saw a person with ideas like his own. He told himself there was something magical and magnetic about her, something alive at her core. Barry could work with this.
“You know what,” he said. “You’re going to be bigger than Martha Stewart. Why don’t we do it?”
“Wonderful,” Paula replied.
—
One young and ambitious talent agent had started circling the network even before Judy Girard took over. When Ming Tsai was offered East Meets West in 1998, his literary agent at William Morris, Michael Carlisle, referred him to a young agent in the television division, Jon Rosen. At the time, the movie and TV divisions focused on servicing big stars like Clint Eastwood and paid no heed to people in the food television business. No senior agent was likely to take on a first-time host on a small cable channel. But a junior agent might, especially since Ming had an offer on the table waiting to be negotiated.
But, like Paula, Jon was stoked with an inner hunger. Growing up in working-class Leonia, New Jersey, Jon saw his father and stepfather work their way into the upper middle class only to be beaten down by bad luck and changing circumstances. Jon kept a photo on his desk of his father in his twenties, face unlined, dreams in front of him. Jon had decided early that he was going to dig in and get back what his parents lost. Like thousands of yearning guys from New Jersey and elsewhere, he identified with the characters in Bruce Springsteen’s songs who are fueled by a sense that something’s gone wrong and a seething desire to make it right. Jon especially loved a less-well-known Springsteen song called “The Promise,” which included this line:
“Inside I felt like I was carrying the broken spirits of all the other ones who lost.”
—
Jon had been a striker on the soccer team at Boston University, but not good enough to turn pro, so he’d decided to become a sports agent. Out of college, a family connection helped him land an internship at the Fifi Oscard talent agency, then an aunt helped Jon land a job in the William Morris mailroom, where would-be agents at the company traditionally started. The salary was not enough to support him, because he was sending money home to support his mother and sister, so he took a second job working nights and weekends as a stock boy at a Macy’s in New Jersey.
Upon his promotion out of the mailroom, Jon became an assistant to Jim Griffin, who represented Regis Philbin and Geraldo Rivera, among others. Jon was promoted to a full agent at William Morris in 1997, and when Carlisle walked Ming into his office on West Fifty-fifth Street, he was eager to listen.
Jon was still a striker; he strutted around the office as only a muscle-bound five-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch man can. “This guy’s a go-getter, a hustler,” Ming thought. “He’s a bulldog.”
Jon thought big quick. This wouldn’t only be about the contract with Food Network, Jon told Ming. Jim had taught him about licensing riches. Food celebrities could fit into certain marketing opportunities better than actors could. Bill Cosby could do pudding commercials because he was funny and famous. But it wasn’t like Cosby was known as a culinary expert or had invented his own pudding flavors. Ming was not as famous, but he was known for a specific style of cooking and his expertise was clear and sellable: Ming was Asian fusion.
Within a few months, Jon had swung his first endorsement deal for his new client. A potato chip company was coming out with an Asian flavor and marketing it as gourmet. They wanted a quote on how the chip paired with wine, for their bags and press materials. Ming was on a ski vacation in Utah when Jon reached him with the news. The company would pay Ming around $2,000 for the quote. While riding a chairlift, Ming texted something along the lines of, “I love this chip. It goes great with Bordeaux.” After he hit Send, Ming sat in the chair watching pine trees and white snow pass under his skis, occupying his mind with pleasant calculations about his hourly rate. Sending the text had taken two minutes. A thousand dollars a minute equals $60,000 an hour. Nice.
Once William Morris had one happy client in-house, it started attracting more, some to mutual profit, others to mixed results. In 1999, Emeril’s three-year deal for roughly a million dollars was coming to an end. Emeril was opening his fifth and sixth restaurants that year, one in Orlando and one in Las Vegas. He had cookbooks and spices, and cookware companies were clamoring to make deals. It was time to go pro. Shep still collected profits on Emeril’s spices, but was focused again on his music industry clients. “We really need some support,” Tony Cruz said. “I’d like to bring in somebody who has expertise in the entertainment business.”
They scheduled an appointment with the television division at William Morris. In the sixteenth-floor conference room, a group of agents gathered to discuss with Tony and Emeril what they might do for the undisputed heavyweight champion of Food Network. Emeril was interviewing the agents, but the agents were also interviewing him. Jon already knew that if he could get Ming potato chip deals, he could bring Emeril the entire state of Idaho, served three ways. Unfortunately for Jon, Jim Griffin had done a bit of research into the food field, and quickly recognized in Emeril a star with big pop culture appeal who would fit in with his high-profile clients. Jim began to charm Emeril by telling his best stories. After the Jets won the Super Bowl in 1969, he’d represented “Broadway Joe” Namath.
The young agents had all heard the story before of how Joe Namath had come to don panty hose and show his legs for a television commercial. “One day I get approached by this agency called Long Haymes Carr, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina,” Jim began. The agency had sent Jim the storyboards for a commercial they wanted Joe to do. They’d been sitting on his desk for weeks when photographer Harry Benson stopped by his office and saw them on the desk.
“Harry asked me, ‘What’s this?’
“I said, ‘It’s just they want Joe to do this commercial. I don’t know about it.’
“He said, ‘Well, it’s got a homosexual overtone. A man and panty hose?’
“I said, ‘Well, maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s what’s been troubling me about it.’
“He said, ‘Well, it’s real simple. Just have two pretty girls come on in the last frame and kiss him on the cheek. Takes away the whole thing.’”
Griffin made the deal.
“On the way to the shoot, I said, ‘Okay, Joe. Here’s the copy. And there are people from the agency that are going to be there. And then they’re going to take you into makeup and they’ll shave your legs—’
“And he said, ‘What?’
“I said, ‘Yeah, well, you know, panty—’
“He said, ‘Pull the fucking car over.’ Thirty-ninth and Park, I swear to God. And I had to talk my way into it at that point, ’cause I hadn’t told—it was not unusual for him to get his legs shaved during the football season because of all the tape. The problem was this was summer and nobody had told him. So finally I talked him into it, and we went down and did it, and it was a very famous television commercial.”
Namath, Griffin confided, had been paid $75,000 for the ad, a huge payday at the time. Jim suggested that Emeril could likewise change what chefs were worth.
“Most of my clients are one-name celebrities: Regis, Geraldo,” he boasted. “They don’t need to have anybody say their last name ’cause everybody knows who you’re talking about. Emeril has that.” He said he could work a big deal with the Food Network contract and bring in new merchandise—“but,” he added, tailoring his message for his audience, “it’s important for Emeril to only be involved in
something that he actually would use.”
Jon saw Emeril and Tony nodding across the conference room table. Jon respected Jim, but he considered himself the in-house food celebrity expert. He’d identified this new breed of star as his ticket, the way he would escape the fate of his father and stepfather. He might lose Emeril to Jim, but he was going to stay in this field and work it hard, and when the next Emeril walked in, he’d get him.
Tony and Emeril left William Morris impressed and went to dinner at Sant Ambroeus, near the Mark Hotel. They talked it over, but it was clear that Jim could do for them what they could not do for themselves. The next day, Tony told Jim that they wanted to take the next step as long as he agreed to one stipulation: they would only deal with Jim, no one else there. “I do not want all of a sudden to have a bunch of agents running out trying to sell Emeril, and trying to get Emeril into different businesses. We want to work with one person and be strategic on what we do.”
Within months, Tony was meeting with executives from B&G, a specialty foods maker that wanted to buy Emeril’s spice business. Shep had arranged for Emeril’s spices to be sold via an 800 number flashed at the end of Emeril’s Food Network shows and through small distributors. B&G had a national sales force and massive distribution deals with supermarkets. “You guys have a nice little small, niche business,” a B&G executive said.
Jim helped work out an arrangement in which both Emeril and Shep continued to be 50/50 partners collecting licensing profits from the spices, and B&G took over the job of running the business. The spice deal stipulated that if the product hit certain sales targets within five years, B&G would have the right to automatically renew. They hit the five-year sales targets within a year and have renewed ever since.