My Soul Looks Back

by Jessica B. Harris

  While Le Poulailler was our preferred spot, there were other places as well. In later years, entrepreneur Howard Sanders, coproducer of Josephine Baker’s last New York show and Eartha Kitt’s triumphant 1974 return from self-imposed exile, and another friend of Sam’s, became part owner of a short-lived restaurant and cabaret at 1 Lincoln Plaza on Broadway across from Lincoln Center named Cleo’s. It offered a full menu, flower vendors who floated among the diners offering their wares, the occasional strolling fortune-teller, and a roster of jazz performers who were known to aficionados. Cleo’s also boasted headliners and was anchored by occasional appearances by the great Mabel Mercer, who left the St. Regis room that had been named for her to sing there. It quickly became our alternate postopera venue and often a destination in itself.

  Cleo’s differed from Le Poulailler in that it appealed not only to opera aficionados and music lovers but also a unique mix of people: heiresses of dubious provenance, no-count counts, and I’m sure more than a few con men and hustlers roamed the floor alongside the West Side Black bourgeoisie and the neighborhood curious in a twentieth-century potpourri of folks who could have been transplanted from Bricktop’s Paris Club in the 1920s, where Mercer had also sung. A small advertisement in the back pages of the October 4, 1976, issue of New York magazine proclaims, “Lady with a Voice. Mabel Mercer in one of her all-too-rare singing appearances opens October 5th at Cleo’s.”

  Sam and I were probably in the audience. Sam had introduced me to Mabel Mercer while she was still singing at the St. Regis. Mercer’s trajectory was extraordinary. Her career had enough twists and turns to make several miniseries: she had understudied the great African American performer Florence Mills and performed in minstrel show troupes. Mercer had sung Cole Porter songs to Cole Porter, danced with the prince of Wales (Edward, that is), and entertained celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Coco Chanel, Colette, and the Maharani of Cooch Behar: the upper crust of the period.

  By the time that I met her with Sam, she was a legend, and her renditions of songs were the générique theme songs of our relationship. We’d head up to the St. Regis or to Cleo’s and station ourselves at a ringside table and listen to her sing in a quavering voice that had become less crystalline with age but no less poignant and still able to evoke all manner of emotion. When she sang “Why Did I Choose You?” I mused on that question myself looking over at Sam with romance in my eyes and at the same time wondering why he had in fact chosen me.

  Our nights listening to Mabel were magical. Mercer and her music inspired Sam. He’d even written about her in one of the rare articles that he would pull out of the coffee table drawer where he kept all of his writings and read to his enraptured public after the liquor had flowed at a dinner party or a Sunday gathering. It began with a description of Mercer from which I recall only the mention of her dress as being made from “funeral parlor drapes.” Indeed, Mercer was given to heavy brocades that artfully clothed her ample figure. By the time that I met her, she would sit in a straight-backed chair with the impeccable posture that she’d probably been imprinted with at her convent boarding school in England, cross her hands in her lap, and sing. Oh Lord, could she sing, in tones that would create a world in front of our eyes. I was transfixed not only by the songs but the understanding of many of the lyrics for the first time. From British songs like “Chase Me Charlie” by Noel Coward to classics like “Down in the Depths on the Ninetieth Floor” to contemporary songs like “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” the Kermit the Frog song from Sesame Street, she led me to listen to lyrics in a different way. I could certainly see how Sinatra and other great twentieth-century performers claimed that she had taught them about phrasing.

  By then, I was not at all surprised that Sam knew her well (he seemed to know everyone), and she would on occasion come and sit with us between sets. We would exchange casual conversation and compare notes about our cats: Sam’s Blues, my Askia and Mouss, and hers. She had a series of them and delighted in telling us when they were away—“at camp,” as she referred to the boarding facility where they were occasionally kept when she was away from home.

  The haute culture of Le Poulailler and the European sophistication of Cleo’s were the counterpoint to the sho’ nuff reality of Mikell’s and its activity. In a real way, they exemplified the complexity of Sam’s nature, with one side vying with the other for primacy. Each completed him, with the opera providing another West Side hub: one linked to a different world from his in the Village or the one at Queens SEEK, but one in which Sam was no less comfortable. In our years together, I learned to traverse those worlds and to function in each of them with the range of folks whom Sam knew.

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  Goujonnettes de Sole with Ersatz Sauce Gribiche

  An after-opera dinner at Le Poulailler was always a joyous meal. But it was usually around midnight, so light fare was called for. These bites of sole were perfect: fish sticks for the gods. They satisfied the need for food and yet weren’t so heavy that they prevented sleep. At Le Poulailler, they were served with a sauce gribiche, a creamy mayonnaise-like sauce prepared from hard-boiled egg yolks, oil, and vinegar with mustard, chervil, tarragon, capers, and chopped gherkins. I cheat and add the ingredients to a very good store-bought mayonnaise.

  – Serves four –

  6 flounder or sole fillets, about 11/4 pounds

  1 medium egg

  Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

  1/4 cup flour

  3 cups bread crumbs

  4 cups canola oil, or enough for deep-frying

  1 lemon, cut into thin slices

  There is an indentation down the center of each fillet. Place the fillets on a flat surface and cut down the center, making two parallel slices on either side of the bone line. Remove and discard the bone line. Cut each fillet half on the diagonal into 1/2-inch-thick strips.

  Combine the egg, salt, pepper, and 2 tablespoons of water in a small bowl and beat well with a whisk. Pour the mixture into a flat dish for dipping.

  Place the flour on one plate and the bread crumbs on another.

  Season the fish strips with salt and pepper and dredge first in the flour. (Each piece should be coated with flour, but shake to remove excess.)

  Then dip the fish strips in the egg mixture and coat with the bread crumbs. Press lightly with a knife to make the bread crumbs adhere. Roll on a flat surface using one palm.

  Heat the oil in a skillet or wok to 375°F and add the fish strips, about twelve at a time. Turn gently as they cook. Do not overcrowd the pieces in the oil or they will not brown evenly. Cooking time is about 2 minutes per batch.

  Continue cooking until all the pieces are done. Drain on paper towels and serve with the lemon slices and the sauce.

  Ersatz Sauce Gribiche

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  Makes about 11/2 cups

  1 cup very good mayonnaise

  1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

  1 teaspoon minced chervil

  1 teaspoon minced tarragon

  1 teaspoon chopped capers

  3 French small cornichon pickles, minced

  Combine all the ingredients in a small bowl, stirring to make sure the herbs, capers, and pickles are evenly distributed throughout. Serve room temperature along with the goujonnettes.

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  Chapter Six

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  WANDERLUST: SONOMA, HAITI, AND PARIS

  Travel has always been a part of my life, whether I was dreaming about it in my early years or writing about it and doing it in my later ones. It was only natural that Sam and I would travel together to visit some of his friends or in my capacity as a travel editor. We traveled well together. I was the organizer, accompanying foil, and, when funds got slim, occasional wallet; Sam presented me to his friends, and I got to enjoy having a plus one when permitted on a press trip. Our first joint excursion was an important one, as it cemented our couplehood. We we
nt to visit Maya and Paul in Sonoma.

  Sonoma is a different place today, touting itself on the Web as a short ride from San Francisco and adjacent to the better-known Napa. It’s always been sort of Napa’s less-favored younger sister. California was unknown territory to me. I vaguely knew some of the French wine regions: I’d visited Champagne and sampled bubbly in the limestone caves there and sipped my way along the route de vin in Alsace—Ribeauvillé, Riquewihir, Haut-Koenigsbourg, and more—but the California informality of the wine country and the joie de vivre and European style of living took me by surprise. It was a very different part of the world from the Upper West Side and Greenwich Village, where I usually saw Maya. When we visited, it was a time of cooking and visiting Maya’s friends, telling tales, and observing Maya in her natural habitat. Sam had been invited to spend a week and he asked me to join him, perhaps as a shield against feeling left out of Maya’s newfound domestic bliss.

  Maya had a home in a Mediterranean-looking town of red-tile roofs complete with a guesthouse in which we were comfortably ensconced. At dinnertime we went up to the main house. The kitchen had an open plan, and there was a large island in the middle. There was also a fireplace in the dining area and Maya burned lavender in a fire shovel, which perfumed the entire space with a wonderful aroma. It was a lovely trick and would take the pungency of the curry that she was going to cook out of the air. Then it was time to cook; the meal was an eight-boy curry. Maya explained that the “boys” were named for the number of servants who would carry the condiments to the table. And there could be as many as twelve or fifteen. The dish was not a curry in the classic Indian sense, but similar to an Indonesian rijsttafel, or rice table, in which the dishes are spread out in a jewel-like array with the guests selecting among them. A chicken curry was the main event, but the “boys” were what made the dish for a condiment lover like me. I do not remember all of the eight condiments (or in fact if there were eight of them; there may have been ten), but they ranged from chopped peanuts to Major Grey’s chutney. I do not remember the tastes of the food, only that they were richly varied and deeply satisfying and spoke to the creativity and exquisite culinary sensibility of the cook.

  The preparation was an exercise in hospitality. Maya’s cooking was a virtuoso performance that was part monologue and part dance routine, totally engaging and absolutely fascinating. There was a snippet of a song from a musical comedy at one point, a twist and a boogie at another, and a final flourish as a condiment was added. All was underscored by a running patter of anecdotes from her travels studded with information on the ingredients, commentary on the preparation, and descriptions of each dish. It was a whole new form of dinner theater: an entertainment calculated to astonish, amaze, and delight. Anyone who ever saw Maya in the kitchen knew that she loved cooking and adored entertaining—and she was damned good at it. I was captivated, and from then on remained in her thrall (albeit at a distance—flying too close to a flame can burn a moth).

  Maya knew most of Sonoma, and they knew and respected her as well. After all, even though this was early in her literary career, it was after the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had made her an international star and certainly a notable in the small village that Sonoma was in the 1970s. Then there was the fact that the take-no-prisoners fierce, six-foot-tall Black woman stood out in a crowd, commanded attention, and had become one of the area’s leading lights.

  Maya guided us through Sonoma. We journeyed to her various haunts in the area. One excursion was to Sebastiani Vineyards, where the Sebastianis were friends. The family patriarch was an old Italian winemaker of the kind that existed in the area before the “judgment of Paris” proclaimed California wines equal to those of France and made California wine country a tourist destination. We sampled and tasted, and I bought a bottle or two, but then he presented us with some bottles of his pet project—a wine called the Eye of the Swan. It was a New World variation that he’d crafted of the classic oeil de perdrix (eye of the partridge), which was a very special rose-pink champagne—a white made from black grapes, or blanc de noir, as that type of white wine is called in France. Sebastiani’s swan’s eye was glorious—lush and well-rounded with a salmon tinge. I bought a few more bottles and one came back to New York with me and lived in the back of my wine cupboard for several years.

  One of the highlights of Sonoma for me was that I met Maya’s mother, Lady (as she was called by everyone). I don’t remember why she showed up or if we went to meet her somewhere, but one day, there she was. Lady surprised me; she was in many ways like my mother—except that my own mother didn’t carry a loaded pistol in her bag. Lady was fierce and petite and exuberant, just like my mother; she was also a Capricorn like her, and we joked for a bit about goat-headed people and their stubbornness.

  Sam and Lady had a particular affinity; he loved that she could finger-pop and bust a move with the best of them. He loved her joie de vivre, love of fine clothes, love of good food and ability to cook it, and her fondness for brown liquor, all of which he mirrored. I suspect that he also appreciated that her temper was as hair trigger as his own and perhaps even savored that she was completely unlike his own mother, Zula Floyd, the staid matriarch whom I’d met in Durham. One glance at Lady and you could clearly see the pentimento of the glamorous younger woman that she surely had been. She was dressed to the nines, and when she was ready to do something, she twirled on her high heels and, as she put it, “get her heels to clickin’ ” and headed off to conquer the world. It was easy to see where Maya got her fierce sense of self and her fearlessness.

  Our visit to Sonoma included an obligatory stop in the San Francisco area. We left Paul and Maya for a day and headed down to the Bay Area, where Sam and I shared a meal at Mandarin, which had by then moved to Ghirardelli Square. The Chinese food served at Mandarin was exceptional, sophisticated, and tasty at a time when New York—indeed, the rest of the country—knew Chinese food only as a much Americanized version of Cantonese fare, quite unique. As I’d by then come to expect, Maya knew the owner, Cecilia Chiang, and had suggested the place as a must-see stop for San Francisco. Indeed it was.

  The restaurant, which was on its way to becoming legendary, showcased the more complex tastes of Chinese food. It was one of the first places to serve Szechuan and Hunan cuisine, and the menu listed items such as hot-and-sour soup and pot stickers, as well as an astonishing minced squab that was served in lettuce-leaf containers. The decor was as amazing as the food. Located on the famous square with views of Alcatraz Island and Fisherman’s Wharf outside the windows, it was like no other Chinese restaurant I’d ever seen. Not a dragon or phoenix was in sight; rather, it was an opulent palace with wood-beamed ceilings and decorated with Chinese antiques. Chiang, who was given to greeting customers at the door in a silk cheongsam adorned with jewelry from her extensive and very expensive collection, was as much a part of the lure of the place as the food. The three-hundred-seat restaurant was astonishingly elegant; the service was extraordinary, and the food tasted like nothing I’d ever had before. It set my bar for subsequent Chinese food quite high.

  But this was a dinner excursion, so soon it was back to Maya’s and our continuing round of visits to her friends in the surrounding area. We spent some time in Oakland with Maya’s friend Jessica Truehaft (née Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford), one of Britain’s Mitford sisters. She was the next to the last of the six daughters of the second Baron Redesdale who were a litmus test for the foibles and fantasies of the twentieth century. Nancy, the eldest, became an author and wrote Love in a Cold Climate, as well as biographies of historic figures like Louis XIV and Madame de Pompadour. Pamela was the least notorious and was referred to as “the rural Mitford.” Diana was married to Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Fascist party. The next youngest sibling, Unity, was even further to the right and a friend of Hitler and active in his social set. The youngest of the sisters, Deborah, known as Debo, became the dowager duchess of Devonshire.

  Jessica
—“Decca,” as she was known to her friends—described their unorthodox childhood in Hons and Rebels. Decca hewed to the opposite end of the political spectrum from her siblings, became a member of the Communist party, and moved to America, where she worked as a reporter and journalist. Her investigation of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, had been a best seller a decade before we drove down to spend the afternoon. I’m not sure where Maya and Decca met, but Decca had certainly been very active in the civil rights movement so it may have been that.

  Awe was my main emotion for much of the trip to California, and certainly meeting one of the Mitford sisters (and the “cool” one at that) was the icing on the cake as far as I was concerned. I remember a warm welcome and much political conversation with in-crowd references that went over my head, although Jessica and I joked about sharing what was then an uncommon name. Most of all, I remember conviviality and an afternoon spent with people with a fierce love for language and rapier-fast wit trading conversation, opinion, and occasionally jokes in a California garden.

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  I had the invitation the next time that we traveled together: Sam and I journeyed to Haiti after I snagged a trip to the opening of the casino at the Royal Haitian Club, a spot that was created to lure tourists to the island. I was invited on an excursion to report on this casino, a trip that the government was sponsoring in an attempt to bolster tourism and usher in a new era of gambling on the island. The trip was notable because it was my first and only assignment related to gambling. I am absolutely not a gambler; I don’t even play bingo and know no card game other than Old Maid, so Sam and I soon found a way to relax rules and spent our time hanging out with Nourry Menard, Paule Marshall’s husband. He owned a soda company in Haiti that bottled the island’s popular Kola Champagne and other drinks and spent some of his time there.