by Allen Salkin
These endorsement deals for Emeril, and in smaller ways for other network stars like Ming, were an unmistakable marker of the rising status of chefs in pop culture, particularly chefs who carried the imprimatur of the Food Network. Success as a host could spark success on the commercial side, which created more media exposure, and more potential eyeballs for the network and the host, all of it a positive fame cycle. Shep, seeing that Emeril and other chefs were indeed becoming the popular artists he had worked to make them, stepped further away from the business.
Not every agent after him possessed his uncanny instincts. It is easy for a celebrity to say he or she will only endorse products that fit his or her image. It is another thing to turn down money when it is offered. Woody Allen once pitched Smirnoff vodka, and Groucho Marx sold Frosted Flakes. Jim brought Emeril to Elmo for the straight-to-video feature Elmo’s Magic Cookbook.
A far riskier decision proved disastrous. In the fall of 2000, in Los Angeles, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a television producer whose credits with her business partner and husband, Harry Thomason, included the CBS hits Designing Women and Evening Shade, found herself watching Emeril Live on Food Network. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s hits, she and Harry had stumbled with unmemorable shows such as Women of the House and Hearts Afire. With the loss of their development deal at CBS, Linda knew A-list stars would be resistant to working with her. But an unorthodox talent like a chef might be more open. Linda was impressed by the chef’s charisma, and, with her showbiz radar, she saw Emeril as a blustery Jackie Gleason type—beefy but vulnerable. Watching Emeril clown during his cooking show, she wondered, Can he do comedy?
She and Harry reached out to Jim and Emeril about the possibility of a sitcom—a half-hour comedy in which Emeril would play a chef named Emeril who had a television cooking show. The star didn’t say no, although it seemed strange to Emeril, who still saw himself as more chef than entertainer. Linda wrote a few lines of sample dialogue, and Harry asked Emeril if he would mind reading for the part.
Harry came to New York to hear Emeril read. Back in L.A., he told Linda, “Honey, I think he can do this.”
Emeril had taken over Julia Child’s role at Good Morning America as a food correspondent, so Bloodworth and Thomason tried pitching the show to ABC. The network passed. In December, the executive producer of the Today Show, Jeff Zucker, was named president of NBC Entertainment. Zucker had long been an Emeril fan and had unsuccessfully tried to lure him to Today. Before he moved to California to take up his new post, Jim pitched the sitcom to him and closed the deal.
Overcoming Emeril’s doubts, the producers assured him he did not need the acting chops of Robert De Niro for the show to work. Around the William Morris offices, Jim bragged to Jon and anyone else within earshot, “You can have all the other food stars. I have Emeril, the biggest of them all.”
Within a few months, it was clear that Jim had led Emeril into troubled waters. Linda and Harry quickly created a pilot that network executives and a few critics saw in the spring. TV critics were savage. One called it “a train wreck.” Others noted Emeril’s obvious lack of acting experience and declared the scenes with his “wife” and “young children” at home screamingly dull.
Production on the series proceeded anyway, but in the lead-up to the debut, scheduled for fall 2001, Zucker spoke to the press and offered faint praise: “It’s not embarrassing. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea. But we’re betting that it’s going to appeal to a lot of people.”
Producers tweaked the show so that most of the action happened on the set of the cooking show. Two characters were added, a food stylist and Emeril’s talent agent, played by the veteran actor Robert Urich. In one of the advance ads for the September 25 debut, Urich was shown sitting around with too much makeup on his face. When Emeril approaches, Urich explains, “It’s just a little bronzer.”
“You look like a penny,” Emeril replies, emphasizing the punch line with a stiff forward roll of his shoulders.
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Barry may have believed that Paula Deen was a great candidate to host a cooking show, but no one at Food Network or any other place seemed to agree. At meeting after meeting throughout 2000 and 2001, he heard excuses like, “She speaks Southern,” “Gray hair,” and “She’s not really a size two now, is she, Barry?” In other words: She sounds like a hick, she’s old, and she’s fat.
Barry had dealt with rejection plenty of times before. His client Peter Brennan had created Judge Judy, featuring a former family court judge from Brooklyn who tartly dispensed justice and life lessons in a mock small claims court. When they were shopping the pilot, naysayers dropped uncouth dismissals—from the broad “Are you out of your mind?” to the bigoted “Who’s going to watch a show starring a loudmouth Jew from Brooklyn?”
Doggedly, Barry had insisted, “You know most of the things that really worked well on TV were things that people never anticipated.” By 2000, Judge Judy, picked up in 1996, was profitably on the air nationwide in first-run syndication, breaking ratings records and earning Emmy nominations. The star, Judith Sheindlin, would build a fortune estimated at more than $100 million.
When Barry pitched Paula at Food Network, Eileen Opatut told him, “You just don’t get our business anymore.” Times had changed, she said. The network was trying to get smarter, not dumber.
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The programming department was not in the mood for fried chicken. But with the network’s talent ranks thinned by Judy, something new certainly was needed. As hard as talent agents like Jon and Barry were working, there were still precious few of them in the food TV field pitching clients. Most of the latter came to the attention of the network through their own hard work and determination. Luck helped, too. And, doubtless, fate.
After Judy had seen Rachael Ray’s first pitch tape and recommended it to Eileen and Matt, the cook and her tape had vanished into the cracks of the network. It had been a hell of a journey for her to get to the point where she was even noticed by Food Network’s president.
Rachael was a petite, stocky young woman with thick brown hair, a quick smile, and a naturally hoarse voice, the aftereffect of a childhood battle with croup. Her family was in the restaurant business, and growing up, she’d washed dishes in the summer and worked the waffle iron. Her parents had divorced when she was thirteen, and her mother, Elsa, moved Rachael and her siblings to Lake George, New York, where Elsa helped manage a chain of Howard Johnsons. Rather than hire a babysitter, she often took Rachael and her older sister and younger brother to work with her. Rachael helped out in the restaurant. She donned an unbreathable polyester uniform that got so hot in the summer, it was like wearing ten layers of garbage bags, except uglier—the uniform was burnt orange with a button-on plaid apron. At five foot three, she had to leap into the ice cream chest to reach the tubs and scoop out cones. Balancing on the edge of the freezer, where a trail of ice water and melted ice cream collected, would leave her with a malty-colored stripe across her chest.
Every Christmas, she visited New York City with her family. They took her to the toy store FAO Schwarz, where there were five floors of dolls, musical instruments, and puzzles to play with and a hair salon. Paradise. She began to form fantasies about moving to the city when she grew up, and decided that something magical would happen to her there.
At twenty-three, she made the move and got an apartment in Queens. A guard dog named Lisa lived chained outside the front wall of her apartment building and Rachael befriended her. She felt sorry for the dog and would bring her food, wash her face, and sit and pet her.
She found a job running a candy counter in the gourmet-foods Cellar at Macy’s. When store managers tried to transfer her away from the food department, she left and found a job at a gourmet market opening uptown, Agata & Valentina. A fiercely hard worker who could fix a meat slicer and unstick a balky cash register, she’d be at the store receiving deliveries at 4:45 a.m., whic
h meant waking up at 3 a.m. in Queens, and would stay past midnight. One night after her boss dropped her off at home, Rachael was mugged. Two young men had been hanging out in her building’s vestibule out of sight of the dog, and as her boss drove off and she fumbled for her keys, one pulled a gun and demanded her money.
She screamed, “Please don’t kill me!” as she pulled out a tiny canister of pepper spray her father had given her and aimed it at his face. He screamed, covered his face, and ran. The police drove Rachael around for hours looking for him, to no avail. She slept an hour and a half and went back to work.
A few days later at work, she was sitting cross-legged when the wall phone rang. Her foot had fallen asleep and when she got up, she stepped down wrong and snapped her ankle. Her difficulties deepened from there.
Ten days later, the attacker was back, waiting for her outside her building. It wasn’t clear what he wanted this time except to hurt her. He dragged Rachael off her crutches into a dark spot and began beating her with the gun.
This time she yelled, “Lisa! Lisa!”
The dog came charging up the alley on her long chain. The mugger ran off. Rachael, hobbling on her broken foot, fell hard on the ground.
Rachael called her mother every day, and that night she made the call from a hospital.
“I think I have to go home,” Rachael, beaten and bruised, confessed. Elsa agreed. New York had not been magical.
Friends helped her load up her possessions, and Rachael, twenty-seven, moved in with her mother, two hundred miles from the city. She found work at Cowan & Lobel, a gourmet market in Albany. Driving to work one morning, Rachael swerved and flipped her truck. Soaked in gasoline, she climbed out and called her mother, who drove her to work. She was in charge of receiving perishable goods at the market and was afraid that if she did not show up to log the deliveries properly, the cheese order might get messed up.
Her relentless “I’ll handle it” work ethic led Rachael to take on yet more responsibility at Cowan & Lobel. Her mother sometimes suggested that she work a little less and take some time for herself. But Rachael considered herself a pale comparison to her mother, who had worked hundred-hour weeks throughout her childhood. At the store, she noticed that some ingredients were not selling and suggested to Donna Carnevale, a member of the family who owned the shop, that they promote a twist on Domino’s Pizza’s promise to deliver a pie in thirty minutes or less by hiring chefs to teach classes on how to use the store’s products to cook a meal at home in thirty minutes or less. The store started selling gift certificates to the classes, but couldn’t turn a profit because of the cost of hiring chefs. Rachael was already in charge of making their ready-to-eat takeout meals—lasagnas, chicken dishes, and the like. She seemed to know what she was doing. “Why don’t you teach the class?” Donna asked.
“No, people are going to want the whole chef experience,” Rachael protested.
“They are eating your food already,” Donna replied, winning the point.
The classes were popular. Dan DiNicola, a reporter for the CBS-affiliated TV station WRGB, took one, and was so charmed that he offered Rachael a weekly three-minute cooking segment on the local news. Over time, the segments were filmed at viewers’ houses. Rachael drove her pots, pans, and ingredients around in her car and cooked dinners in their kitchens. She loved the work, but she was paid around $50 a segment, far less than each cost her to make.
At dinner with the WRGB news director Joe Coscia, she bemoaned the situation: “Joe, I don’t have enough money to pay my rent.”
He helped her produce some local travel advice segments, getting her on the air more and creating content he thought they might be able to sell to other stations in the area. They also made a pilot of a cooking show, shot at the cabin in Lake Luzerne that Rachael shared with her mother. On a wall was a painting of her late grandfather, an Italian immigrant and a stonecutter who babysat her as a little girl. It was a homespun little show, showing food and family and a smiling young woman working to make everyone happy. This was the pilot that had not impressed Matt Stillman and Eileen. But local viewers regularly asked her if she had a cookbook. Rachael cold-called Hiroko Kiiffner, a one-woman publishing house. Hiroko was skeptical—she’d heard fifteen-minute meals and twenty-minute meals and half-hour meal concepts before—but eventually was willing to take a shot. The book, Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals, published in 1999, sold ten thousand copies in two weeks at Albany-area supermarkets, a wild success. Hiroko put the book into a second printing after only three months.
Luck favors the extremely well prepared and talented. Early in the spring of 2000, Lou Ekus, the cooking show coach who had trained Ming, Bobby, and Sara, was driving to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. He was listening to a local radio station and a woman he had never heard of was being interviewed about her cookbook. He was so transfixed by how natural she was on the air that after he pulled into the parking lot at CIA, he sat in the car to listen to her. She did everything he would have coached someone to do—be charming, reveal personal details, be concise, and be clear. Lou did what he had never done before—he picked up the phone and called Bob Tuschman at Food Network to recommend someone.
“I don’t know who this woman is,” he told Bob. “I have no idea what she looks like, but here’s a name you need to look into—Rachael Ray. Her shtick is thirty-minute meals. I just heard her do a perfect interview on a local news station in Albany about her cookbook. She was so much fun and so energetic, you should check her out.”
Bob had not heard of her either, but he went to the network’s cookbook library. A copy of Rachael’s book was on the shelf. Her photo was on the cover. She looked fresh and happy. The recipes appealed to him. Bob never had time to cook complicated meals at home during the week and he thought the thirty-minute concept was good, as was her promise that she only used ingredients people could buy at a regular supermarket.
He called Hiroko and asked about meeting Rachael.
“That’s so funny,” she said. “I’ve got a call from Al Roker also. And he’s going to put her on the Today Show. She’s going to be in New York in a week.”
Roker, who had a country house in upstate New York, had seen Rachael on local TV. “There’s this really cute girl on Albany television,” he told a Today producer. “I think she might be kind of fun to be on our show.” It took Rachael and her mother nine hours to drive down to the NBC studios in a blizzard for her appearance on March 6, 2001.
From her first pop on national television, Rachael was gold—so obviously appealing that you can sense what Lou had heard on the radio simply by reading the transcript from her appearance on Today.
AL ROKER: This morning on Today’s Kitchen, comfort foods of the century. With the kids home from school and a winter that just won’t go away, neither will my friends, there’s nothing better than cuddling up in your flannels with some hot and tasty comfort food. Rachael Ray, author of Comfort Foods: Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals, is here—you got very excited when I said that.
RACHAEL RAY: Yeah, it’s cool. Al’s saying my name. Groovy.
ROKER: She’s here to show us how to make one-pot dishes.
RAY: Yeah.
ROKER: So, now what’s the deal? Why are we so excited about comfort foods these days, Rach?
RAY: Well, because they bring everybody back to their beginnings, you know. Comfort foods are as different as wherever you grew up, you know.
ROKER: Right.
RAY: My grandfather is from Sicily, so for my mom, a big pot of escarole and beans is comfort food. My dad’s from down South, so for him, jambalaya is comfort food. Me, I’ve always lived in the Northeast, so what we’re going to make right now is comfort food for me.
ROKER: Chicken and dumplings.
RAY: Chicken and dumplings soup.
ROKER: All right. How do we get started?
RAY: Okay. Well, I know you
know how to cook, but can you just pretend you don’t for a minute, okay?
ROKER: Okay. I have no idea.
RAY: Quick—quick chopping lesson.
ROKER: Uh-huh.
RAY: If you’re not comfortable in the kitchen, first thing to do, get a firm grip about whatever you’re chopping, curl your fingers under so they don’t call you lefty.
ROKER: Okay.
RAY: Okay? Get a nice sharp knife. . . .
That, my friends, is how it’s done. Within two minutes, you’ve learned about where she comes from, what she’s going to make, and why she’s going to make it. In the process, she has captivated her interviewer, told a joke, and taught a lesson. It’s not as easy as she made it look, but after a childhood in restaurants and years of work, it was easy for her.
The day after her Today appearance, Rachael met Bob, Eileen, and Kathleen Finch in a Food Network conference room.
She had them charmed immediately, especially when she tried to talk them out of hiring her. She had been watching Food Network. She knew the big stars were respected chefs like Mario, Bobby, and Emeril.
“Listen,” Rachael said. “You’re champagne, I’m beer out of the bottle. I clearly don’t belong here, I’m not a chef. You’ve been duped.”
She got out of her chair, sincerely prepared to leave.
“No, no, no, stop,” Bob said, laughing. “That’s what we like. We don’t want you to be a chef.” Nigella Lawson wasn’t a chef, and she was a star. The network was prepared to expand the roster a bit in its instructional programming. A cookbook writer like Nigella or Rachael could work.
Bob was sold. She had enthusiasm, charisma, and a down-to-earth quality. She may not have been exactly what Eileen was looking for, but Eileen did not find her nearly as objectionable as she had Paula. The busy New Yorkers she knew certainly could use tips on how to cook meals quickly. Although Eileen had recently signed one of the founding fathers of celebrity chefdom, Wolfgang Puck, for a cooking show, she understood that Judy was willing to serve both champagne and beer as long as they both had fizz.