by Allen Salkin
At the time of Rachael’s debut, the network was expanding its reach dramatically. Between August and November 2001, it added four million new subscribers, and two million more came in the first four months of 2002, bringing the network into seventy-two million homes. Food Network programs had a better chance than ever of reaching enough eyeballs to make a significant cultural dent. Prime-time ratings increased 25 percent in 2001 over 2000.
More attention was heaped on Rachael when her domestic travel and dining show, $40 a Day, debuted in April 2002. “Bubbly,” the Los Angeles Times reviewer called her. “The host seems to be having the time of her life as she tours points of interest, learns the history of the various dining spots and then invades the kitchen for recipes. Along the way, she . . . thanks a man for taking a photo for her with a hearty, ‘Yeah! You rock!’ and high-fives a chef while shouting, ‘Right on!’ . . . Watching Ray at work within the $40 a Day system is a real treat.”
Jon Rosen was watching. He’d never met Rachael, but his assistant tracked her down on vacation in France.
“Your personality translates directly across the screen and makes me feel like I’m in the room with you,” he said when he reached her by phone.
As soon as she was back in the States, she came in to William Morris and signed. Before Jon could start bringing deals to her, Rachael, characteristically, figured out a way to bring in her own. Soon after the debut of 30 Minute Meals, a friend invited her to a birthday party. Everyone there seemed to be a model or an actor, the kind of Manhattan fashion party where everyone was gorgeous and a foot taller than Rachael. Across the room, through a sea of shoulders and scarves, she spied another vertically challenged head. It belonged to John Cusimano, a distributor of independent films. They got to talking. She said she was the host of a show on the Food Network. He’d never seen her show, but he told her he loved food.
“Oh, yeah?” Rachael asked. “What was the last meal you cooked?”
He knew she assumed he would say something like chicken parmesan or chili.
“Last night I went to the fish market,” John said. “I got a piece of tilapia and I sautéed some tomatillos with some jalapeños and cilantro and deglazed the pan with a Negro Modelo. I served some mâche on the side.”
“Wow!” Rachael replied. “I have a great guy for you, ’cause you must be gay if you’re cooking so great.”
“No,” John said, sensing his opening. “Actually, I am not.”
Hours into the nonstop, easy-flowing conversation, the host of the party came up to them and said, “Dummies! This is the person I was trying to introduce each of you to for a year!”
They were rarely apart after that. But to be rarely apart from Rachael meant participating in her career. 30 Minute Meals was just starting, and Rosen had not developed any product endorsements for her yet, but after a few months, Rachael told John that her fans were writing to the Food Network and telling her at book signings that they wanted to know where they could buy Rachael Ray products. On her show, she always mentioned how useful it was to have a “garbage bowl.” Instead of taking the time to dump every carrot shaving and orange peel into a trash bin across the room, Rachael kept a bowl on the counter to fill up with discards while she cooked quickly. She also used a Santuko-shaped knife that was unusual for trained TV chefs. It was a Japanese-style blade that had a scalloped face and a long, flat bottom edge, making slicing easier for amateurs. She also used what she called a “moppine,” an all-in-one oven mitt and kitchen towel. They were all helpful time-savers she used at home. And none of them was available branded with her name.
One night after shooting at the Food Network, she and John sat at a hotel bar having a vodka, club soda, and lime, and on a cocktail napkin, she sketched an idea for a cooking pot she’d like to own. It was oval and just longer than a piece of dry spaghetti. “You’re a lawyer,” she told him. “Can you figure out a way that we can sell my products?”
John had marketed small films like My Life’s in Turnaround and Conspiracy of Silence and worked out licensing agreements. He did some research and found out that the Cannes Film Festival of kitchen products was the Chicago International Home and Housewares Show. He put together fifty homemade press kits containing articles about Rachael and the Food Network. Rachael had torn out an article about Anolon pots. She liked the weight and the look of them. She asked him to find the Anolon booth at the show and find out if they’d be interested in making an oval spaghetti pot. Her little drawing of it was in the press kit, too. Although they were not married yet, Rachael felt comfortable entrusting John. They had been together nearly every free moment since they’d met. And their relationship would help their marketing efforts. People will be interested in the fact that we’re together, she thought. It has sort of a mom-and-pop feel to it.
In Chicago, John found the Anolon booth and met the vice president of product development, Suzanne Murphy. He showed her the pasta pot drawing. “As an added bonus,” he said, “if you have a small, narrow stove, like you do in an apartment, and Rachael does at her cabin upstate, you can fit two of them easily next to each other and still have just as much cooking space.”
Susanne had heard of Rachael and liked the pot idea. They agreed to speak about it further.
John hung up his film hat. This was easier than flogging little movies.
Soon, John and Rachael, with Jon Rosen’s help, launched a series of new products: garbage bowls with Meyer, spaghetti pots with Anolon, and knives with Furi.
—
The success made Jon Rosen bolder. In regular brainstorming meetings at William Morris, he told anyone who would listen, “I want to go after Bobby Flay.” Outside of Emeril, Bobby was the biggest fish at Food Network. Jon knew Bobby was with Richie Jackson, but Richie was a boutique agency. Jon could do stuff for Bobby that a small company never would. How could Jon get into a room with him?
Jennifer Rudolph Walsh in the literary department told Jon that a girlfriend of hers had worked for Bobby. “I can get to him,” she said.
Bobby agreed to a meeting. He walked into the same conference room Emeril had walked into years earlier, except this time, Jon was ready. He had assembled a group of people he felt were loyal to him, people from the books division, the speakers division, commercials, scripted television. He’d seen what Rachael and John Cusimano had done, and it had expanded his vision even further.
Thanks to his assistant’s research, Jon knew that Bobby had played basketball growing up, that he had developed a taste for the world of fashion, that he liked to travel, that he had a daughter from his second marriage, and that he was interested in horse racing. Jon had this all written out on a notepad in front of him. “You’re a star,” Jon said. “You’re phenomenal. And I want to bring you in.”
He told Bobby he could be a massive brand, that all of his interests could be leveraged into endorsements and businesses. “All you’re really doing right now is television. How about a turkey endorsement deal? Maybe a board game deal? Big-money corporate speaking engagements? I know I can call up about you,” Jon said, “and say, ‘Guys, here’s why you should do this endorsement deal with Bobby. Did you know that he is a father, and did you know that Thanksgiving is the biggest day of the year for him, and he has forty of his family and friends over and there’s a Trivial Pursuit match?’”
Bobby left and talked it over with his girlfriend, actress Stephanie March, who was then costarring on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
“I think I’m gonna make this move,” Bobby told her. “Nothing against Richie, I just think that this machine is bigger. You know they have Emeril, they have Rachael, but I don’t mind being third in this deal.”
She agreed. She’d been around Hollywood long enough to know that a powerful agency can open doors.
When he broke the news to Richie, who had recently negotiated his new three-year deal with Food Network for around $800,000, his longtime
agent told him, “I feel like we’ve done a good job for you.”
“You have,” Bobby said. “There are limits to a boutique firm like this. You know, just where all the media’s going now, and endorsements and books and everything else, I just need to be in a more encompassing place.”
That was that.
Soon Jon made a deal for Bobby to endorse Butterball turkeys. A luxury car company called William Morris: they wanted to hire a celebrity chef to cook a special lunch for the wives of its top salesmen. Was Emeril available? No, but Bobby was.
He didn’t mind playing second fiddle to the king. Especially when the car company was willing to pay $30,000 for an afternoon’s work.
—
Paula Deen shot the two pilots in Savannah, but the producers assigned to the show brought the network’s prejudices with them. They dressed her in cashmere and pearls. They tried to make her look like a refined Southern lady and coached her relentlessly. One pilot was called “Afternoon Tea.”
When Barry saw the tapes, he was appalled. This wasn’t the gutsy woman with an inner magic. This woman was cowed and bland.
Before Judy had a chance to see them herself, Barry went to her office. “Do me a favor,” he said. “You can’t watch the pilot.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Judy said. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“I’m telling you,” he said, “it’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen. So you don’t have to watch it just so you can tell me it’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen. I’m already telling you it’s really that bad, but it’s because you fucked it up. You sent all your people down there, and they didn’t allow her to be who she was! They tried to turn her into your version of what she should be in Savannah, Georgia. But that’s not it! Let her be who she is! Don’t gentrify her—and don’t bother looking at the show.”
If there was a lifetime achievement award for chutzpah, Barry Weiner deserved one. “We’ll do a show for you at cost,” he pressed. “Give me any time period, I don’t care where it is. You have nothing to lose! You have time periods on your network right now when nobody is watching. So you might as well let somebody not watch one of my shows instead of yours.”
After two hours, he wore Judy down. “Just get the fuck out of here,” she laughed. “You got thirteen.”
Months before the first of thirteen episodes of Paula’s Home Cooking aired, Paula fussed over TV critics at a promotional lunch in Los Angeles. She served them creamed corn and fried chicken and peered over their shoulders “to make sure you’re cleanin’ your plates.” The show’s debut in November 2002 was part of the still-chugging “Cooking School” block on Saturdays. Critics raved, notably those outside New York. “Her show is like watching your favorite aunt whip up a yummy banana split cake or lemon chess pie while you sip coffee at the kitchen table,” wrote Reagan Walker in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Judy called Barry to thank him. The network’s programming had been too focused on the taste of the coasts, she said. It was like the famous New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg where the city is the center of the Earth and everyplace else on the planet is a tiny sliver.
“You proved something to me,” she said. “You proved that we have an audience beyond the Hudson River. Thank you.”
Soon, endorsement offers for Paula were coming in, small things, regional brands. Barry told her to say no for now.
“But they’re offering cash money!” she said more than once.
“We’re not doing it,” he said.
“What do you mean, we’re not doing it?” she asked, incredulous.
“You said you wanted to be Martha Stewart,” he said. “We’re going to be bigger than Martha Stewart. If we take every offer now, all that’ll happen is it’s like you’re becoming a whore.” He told her to wait until the endorsement offers were for millions of dollars, not a few thousand.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. But she agreed to keep doing it his way.
Players like Barry, Jon, and others, who had found their ways to the launching pad, were poised to propel the network and its stars into a celebrity stratosphere that few besides Shep had envisioned. But first, they needed more talent that was capable of making the journey.
Noodle Roni with Blue Eyes: A New Kind of Star
When Food Network executives traveled the country conducting audience research at the turn of the millennium, they asked a cross-section of Americans: What do you cook? How does food play a role in your life? Who cooks in your household? How often do you cook? How much prepared food do you buy? Do you cook “family recipes”?
It turned out that a lot of people thought making a box of Noodle Roni was cooking. Many did not know what a scallion was. The definition of a “family meal” had different meanings. It could refer to a takeout rotisserie chicken brought home and served by a single dad to his three kids around a table at 6:30 p.m. or a dish of “grandma’s lasagna” cooked from scratch by a mother and left on a counter for busy family members to eat as they arrived home. No matter what the family looked like or how far-flung, separated, or busy, food could be its glue.
A man in St. Louis talked about how he had prepared a book of family recipes, which he planned to hand off to his daughters when they got married. A bus driver in Philadelphia said that his kids were getting older, he was about to retire, and the best gift that he could give them was the feeling that they could still come together as a family around food. He loved to cook, and it was a household pillar that gave everyone security.
These stories, not unlike the one Tyler had told her, reminded Eileen Opatut of being taken to the Lower East Side as a little girl to watch shows at the last surviving Yiddish theaters. Afterward, she and her parents would walk down Orchard Street and go to kosher restaurants like Ratner’s. The food—soft onion rolls, cheese blintzes—meant love and comfort to her and connected her to what her mother made at home—Mrs. Opatut boasted that she could make potatoes twenty-eight ways.
Not everyone was telling warm stories. In the focus groups, many people revealed that the traditional connections conjured by food had been unintentionally broken. Family members had moved away from one another, and no one knew what had become of Grandma’s old recipe box. Anyway, who had time to make their own piecrusts, grate their own potatoes for latkes, or roll sheets of pasta? Cooking for most of the busy, younger generation was something only for people who bought high-end magazines like Gourmet and Food & Wine. In those glossy pages were photos of whole fish served seaside on white platters, and chilled bottles of white wine beading on beautiful tables lit by candles in hurricane lanterns and set with vases of bellflowers. It was elitist.
Food Network’s viewers were reporting that all the cooking they were seeing kindled a desire to reclaim a connection to something they had lost, a time when meals were the center of the family—even if it was not a time they had ever personally experienced. For younger people, whose parents had fed them from boxes and takeout containers, cooking was almost an act of rebellion.
This sociological data might seem self-evident in retrospect, but it was not obvious at Food Network, even in 2001. Eileen interpreted the focus groups’ responses to mean that many Americans craved a simple way back to the kitchen—or, at least the feeling of being back in the kitchen. Sure, Food Network could lay down the bread crumbs for people to follow from their televisions to their cutting boards, but the business of food TV was not to get people to cook—it was to get people to watch more food TV. Rachael, the smooth storyteller, was doing something intimate, with none of Emeril’s yelling or the callers who peppered Sara Moulton—just calm, comforting small talk as a hot dinner came together on a set that looked more like a real kitchen. How could that warmth be stoked? What more could Food Network put on the air that would strike those crucial inner chords?
Rachael and Paula came across as members of a viewer’s family. Rachael looke
d the part of a neighbor or a young mom. Paula played the indulgent grandma. She signed off shows with the catchphrase, “With love and best dishes from my kitchen to yours.” No cashier at McDonald’s, no newscaster on CNN or star of Friends ever looked into the camera through the steam of a hot apple pie and sent love to customers or viewers so directly. And as the years unfolded, these kitchen scenes were beamed into America’s homes on larger and larger high-definition televisions, reinforcing the illusion that viewers were somehow looking through a window into their own kitchens, except the ones on TV were homier—their own might have discarded takeout containers from Boston Market. For the purpose of conjuring warmth, it was becoming clear that it was better if the on-screen cook was more a seasoned amateur than a smooth pro, someone who was like a friend or family member whispering tips and sharing her own secret recipes, binding viewers to her like the man in St. Louis was trying to do with his daughters.
High-end cooking demonstration shows were still on the network. Eileen had brought in Jacques Torres, the dessert chef from Manhattan’s Le Cirque, for Chocolate with Jacques Torres. Michael Chiarello, a Napa Valley stalwart, was developing a show called Easy Entertaining. Wolfgang Puck was part of the “Cooking School” block on Saturday mornings. But complaints about Puck’s dense Austrian accent and Torres’s French pronunciations would eventually come in. Viewers could not connect with the foreigners.
Fittingly, amidst the changing focus, Julia Child made her last appearance on Food Network on the episode of Wolfgang Puck’s Cooking Class that aired Friday, November 30, 2001. It was the same month that Rachael’s 30 Minute Meals debuted. The world had been created and paradise lost since the elemental black-and-white days of The French Chef. Julia was now a visitor in a strange land where cooking was less important than the cook. She had appeared on an episode of Emeril Live earlier that year, helping Emeril prepare a roasted chicken—“That’s pretty scrawny,” Julia remarked about Emeril’s bird. “Well, we have no budget this week,” the chef laughed.