Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  SIRIO MACCIONI: When I came to New York in 1956, the Colony on East 61st Street was one of the most famous restaurants in the city. It was the restaurant of society. The best people, like the Rockefellers, the Astors, came there. Fifty years ago there was Café Society, which meant a café where society met. They wanted good food but simple food. They didn’t want to be impressed by a chef who would say, “I’m a three star, and you have to eat what I’m telling you.”

  Most of the haute cuisine French restaurants in New York around that time had a table d’hôte menu. If you asked for a smoked salmon, which is the easiest thing to serve, they would say five dollars extra. If you asked for a soufflé, which is the cheapest thing to make, that was five dollars extra too. The Colony was an a la carte restaurant. The owner, Gene Cavallero, was intelligent enough to keep it simple. He offered a cuisine that was a mixture of French and Italian. He had pasta on the menu, a rarity in those days. The food was served on beautiful, large plates.

  I began working at the Colony not long after I came to New York. As I learned English, I began replacing the head waiters on their days off. One Saturday night, the maitre d’ who had been there for many years died. All the assistants were clamoring to replace him, saying, “I was here the longest.”

  “Calm down,” Cavallero told them. Then he turned to me. “You think you’re good, don’t you?”

  I said, “Well, I don’t know. It’s up to you to judge.” But I knew I was good.

  “You can be in charge for the next couple of weeks. Do you want to try?”

  I tried and I was good.

  My first day on the reservation desk, the phone began to ring. “Mr. Onassis—the usual table.”

  “Mr. Sinatra—the usual table.”

  “The Duke and Duchess of Windsor—the usual table.”

  “Truman Capote—the usual table.”

  “Charles Revson—the usual table.”

  Cavallero comes in. “How’s everything?”

  “Okay,” I said, “but would you mind to tell me what ‘the usual table’ means?”

  He took me by the arm and showed me one table. “Everybody thinks this is his table. But you want to be the maitre d’. It’s your problem.” And he walked out.

  I made up my mind: first come, first served. It happened that the first to come was Frank Sinatra. “Okay, my boy,” he said to me, “I’m going to tell your boss you’re the best. But first I’m going to the bar. Keep my table.”

  I said, “Mr. Sinatra, no, please go to your table.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Somehow I managed to convince him to go directly to his table. The person who wanted that particular table was Onassis. He saw Sinatra and said to me, “You bastard. You gave him my table because he’s Italian.” Thank God those were the days of the three-martini lunches.

  Then came the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They looked right at the table. I ushered them to a banquette. “Please, sit here, it’s very comfortable.”

  The Duke said, “Don’t judge for me what is comfortable. That is my table.”

  I got through that day using all of my charm, but I will remember it all my life.

  At the end of the first week my name appeared in Time magazine. Henry Luce wrote, “The Colony, after forty years, has a new maitre d’. He’s tall, he’s elegant. It would be much better if he could speak English.”

  I worked at the Colony for ten years, and for all that time it enjoyed a big popularity, even as La Grenouille, La Côte Basque, La Caravelle—all the new generation that had started with Henri Soulé—opened. The Colony was more important from the point of view of society than Le Pavillon, even though Le Pavillon had the reputation for the food. It was classical, but heavy-handed.

  One of the reasons the Colony closed is that the son was not that determined. We discussed my becoming a partner, but then the landlord wanted the space back. The rent went to five times what it had been. Meanwhile I received an offer from the Pierre, which was supposed to open a Maxim’s of Paris in the hotel. That did not work out. Instead they opened another beautiful restaurant, La Foret, where I was the maitre d’ and director. I was still very young.

  In 1973, the Pierre was bought by a group from London. The place was making money, which is unusual for hotel restaurants, but the new owners wanted to do something else. At that time, I was approached by William Zeckendorf, Jr., who was a twenty-five percent partner in the Mayfair House on 65th Street, a residential hotel. They were losing money; they asked me to manage the hotel. I said if I do something, I would like to have my own place. So we discussed and came to an agreement, and in 1974, for the first time, a private individual opened a restaurant in a hotel in New York.

  I needed a name for my restaurant that would explain my mentality. To use my own name seemed presumptuous. Then I thought of the French expression “Hier soir on s’est bien amusé. C’était un vrai cirque!” (“Last night, we had such a good time. It was a circus!”) And that is how I came up with the idea of “Le Cirque.” It’s an international idea. It suggests fun. I did not want a place that reminded me of going to church. Instead, I had a mural with monkeys.

  My mentality in cuisine is real classical food but done in a modern approach. We started right away with beautiful plates. We offered broiled fish. In those days when you went to a French restaurant and asked for broiled fish, most of the time they said no. Then they started to do a broiled sole. But because they didn’t have a grill, they would put the fish in the oven and mark it with an iron to give an impression, and for some reason, I don’t know why, would put some paprika on top to give it color.

  The most difficult person in those haute cuisine kitchens was not the chef—it was the saucier. He was usually a schizophrenic person who did not want to talk to anybody. I didn’t believe in that. I believed in the Italian way: You cook the food, you add a little bit of lemon or wine, and that is the sauce. Why bother to buy good meat or fish, cover it with Sole Veronique, make everything look like a souffle? Instead of a saucier, I had the chef put one, two more persons on, and when they are cooking they glacé the pan with cognac, wine, vinegar.

  For dessert, they used to come around with a trolley with a big cake, fruit salad, chocolate mousse, and some floating island. At the beginning of the evening it was good. But once they began to cut . . . That was not my interpretation. I said we have to personalize; every dessert must be made to order. Most places had one pastry chef. I hired four.

  Now as I was creating my own restaurant, I thought, Where is the best food in the world? And the answer was in an Italian home. It is the woman who goes to the market, who knows how to choose the products, who cooks the food. In Italy, people eat well at home. When they go out, its to have a good time. That was my inspiration and my innovation. My philosophy is this: A good restaurant is good home cooking on a professional level.

  When I opened Le Cirque in 1974, I had five kilos of beautiful white truffles sent to me from Italy. A famous lady journalist who was at the opening said to one of my assistants, “You better tell your boss that those potatoes are smelling very bad.” Two years later, this same woman who didn’t know what white truffles were wrote an essay on the subject.

  John Canaday of the New York Times gave us two stars with the potential of four. A couple of years after, Mimi Sheraton came in and took away one star because she said I was presumptuous. People who are mediocre and vulgar like to bring everything down to the same level so they can understand. Now she tells me I am the very best thing that ever happened in New York.

  In Tuscany where I was born, we say we are Italians, but first of all we are Tuscans. I’m joking but I’m not. We believe everything in Europe started from Tuscany: Dante, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci. Any Tuscan farmer thinks he is a descendant of Leonardo da Vinci. It’s presumptuous but not in a bad way.

  MICHAEL TONG: How many New York restaurants can stay open for more than twenty years with the same owners? You can pick them, probably no more than ten: Le Cirque
, Café des Artistes, Shun Lee. . . .

  I came to the United States in 1963 as a student in hotel management. The summers of 1964 and 1965, I worked at the Chinese pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, where I became friends with chef T. Twang, who had been Nationalist China’s ambassador to the United States. He had the idea to open a fine Chinese restaurant in New York City and asked me to be his partner.

  We opened Shun Lee Dynasty on Second Avenue and 48th Street in 1967. Our cuisine was Yang Chow—Szechuan; Yang Chow is a town right next door to Shanghai that is famous for cooking. We were the first Chinese restaurant to pay attention to the decor. As a student in hotel management, I learned how important decor is.

  At that moment in time, the Chinese restaurants in New York were places like Ruby Foo’s or the House of Chan that served the old-fashioned Cantonese food: lobster Cantonese, egg rolls, spare ribs. It was not authentic, but it was a favorite among the Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn and the Bronx, who would take their families to the neighborhood Chinese restaurants every Sunday. The kids grew up loving Chinese food, which is why our best customers are Jews.

  Four very Americanized Chinese girls on a skating outing in 1965. In the 1960s the population of Chinatown was Cantonese—and so were the restaurants.

  Through the 1960s, the population of Chinatown was Cantonese. Not just Cantonese, but from a little village, Tai Sin. Everybody spoke the dialect from that village. If you didn’t speak Cantonese, you could not survive in Chinatown; nobody would talk to you. Restaurant owners wouldn’t give you a job; landlords would not rent space to you.

  At the same time, beginning in the 1950s, after the Communist Revolution, Chinese seamen jumped ship, sought political asylum, and stayed in New York. They worked underground for a few years, got together some money, and opened a few Chinese restaurants around Broadway and 125th Street, where the rent was cheaper and a lot of Chinese people, including students from Taiwan and Hong Kong, lived. These restaurants were all called Shanghai: Great Shanghai, Shanghai Café. . . . This was the beginning of Shanghai cuisine in New York, a new trend in Chinese food. Then it became a combination of Shanghai and a little bit of Szechuan, with things like chicken with peanuts and moo shoo pork. It was not really authentic but it was very new. However, it was all in that one area of the Upper West Side. Most New Yorkers didn’t know about it.

  In the late 1960s, 456 East Broadway opened with a chef from Taiwan. This was the first true Shanghai restaurant in Chinatown. After two years, the chef moved on to his own bigger restaurant, also on East Broadway, which became famous for spicy sauces.

  Meanwhile at our new restaurant, I was out front while my partner was the chef. He didn’t speak English well, but for all the years of our partnership, we had a very good relationship. He trained a lot of young chefs. They were in their twenties then. Today they are in their fifties, and they are still with me.

  I became friendly with a gentleman who regularly ate at our restaurant. We would talk about Chinese food. After about three months, he told me he was Craig Claiborne, the restaurant critic of the New York Times. I didn’t understand how powerful he was. In those days, people who opened Chinese restaurants didn’t read the Friday “Going Out Dining Guide” in the Times.

  One night he said to me, “Michael, my book is coming out.”

  “Really?” I said. “Which book?”

  “The New York Times Dining Out Guide, and your restaurant’s in there.”

  He gave us four stars.

  We began averaging 500 people a night, and we only sat 120 people. So as not to turn away business, we opened a second restaurant, Shu Lee Palace on 55th and Lexington. Two of our chefs were from Hunan and they were buddy-buddy with my partner. That was how we came to open Hunan on Second Avenue and 45th, the first Hunan restaurant in the United States. It was spicy but different, an instant success. Shun Lee was the pioneer not only for Szechuan and Hunan cuisine but for spicy ethnic food. Mexican, Thai, Indian cuisines were not popular until after people got used to the spicy tastes of Szechuan and Hunan food. Shun Lee means smooth sailing, and after the New York Times rating, it was indeed smooth sailing. Craig Claiborne put Shun Lee on the map.

  DOROTHY WHEELOCK: I was theater editor and then features editor at Harper’s Bazaar through the 1940s and most of the 1950s. It was the golden age of the magazine, when Carmel Snow ruled with impeccable instinct and an iron Irish hand as editor in chief, and Alexei Brodovitch, the courtly and paternalistic former White Russian cavalry officer, was art director.

  Mrs. Snow was delicate and dainty with spindly legs always in high heels, white hair, a little turned-up nose, and a little tinge of Irish in her voice. But she was someone you’d pay attention to. She was intuitive and daring. She got the greatest people around her. She wanted the best features, the best stories, the best everything. You’d go to her with an idea, and she didn’t want to know about any difficulty you were having, whether you couldn’t get to someone or someone didn’t want to see you. She wanted the piece whole. And when she got it, she was most appreciative.

  Her mother was an Irish immigrant who worked as a seamstress in Chicago. So Mrs. Snow was brought up with clothes. She knew what you could pluck here and pluck there. She got her clothes in Paris from Chanel, Balenciaga, Dior, and after she’d worn them once or twice, she’d send them around in a limousine to her friends. What wasn’t taken, she’d let us have a go at. Before she showed up at the magazine offices at 572 Madison Avenue every morning, she had read all the newspapers and stopped at the church on Madison and 68th for a quick prayer. “Do you suppose I could stand this job if I didn’t go to church every morning?” she’d say.

  Photographs were beginning to be included in art, and I worked with Alexei Brodovitch choosing photograph assignments, attending sittings, and selecting the many images that appeared in the magazine. “Surprise me,” he’d say when he sent someone out on a shoot. The photographers loved him.

  Diana Vreeland was the fashion editor. She wasn’t beautiful but made herself look so good that everyone was struck by her. She had jet-black hair and a wonderful fashion sense. A woman who went to school with her told me all the girls would ask her, “What should I wear?” “What color suits me best?” We would go to her apartment to watch her get dressed. It took an hour and a half; she was so meticulous.

  There was a snobbism to Harper’s Bazaar. The society girls’ mothers would call Mrs. Snow and say, “Oh, can’t you give my daughter a job?” The debutante daughters would say, “Oh, I’ll do anything”—which means you can’t do anything.

  This famous horseman from Old Westbury asked Mrs. Snow to hire his daughter. “Now, Dorothy,” she said to me, “take this girl in your office.” Well, my God, what a pest she was. She’d get on the phone and call her boyfriend in Paris. After a week, I said, “I can’t get any work done with that girl around. She doesn’t know a darn thing. Why don’t you give her to the Fashion Department?” At least the girls in the Fashion Department worked hard; they had to drag all the bags to the fashion fittings and shoots.

  We had a shoot at Louise Dahl Wolf’s studio with the poet Edith Sitwell, who was about to begin an American lecture tour. We were to photograph her in this robelike dress of red velvet trimmed with gold that she had made for the tour. Miss Sitwell was a very tall woman, and the dress was very heavy and queenly. She was sitting on a chair looking at herself in the mirror. “I’ll get the dress on you, Miss Sitwell,” I said. I stood on a chair behind her and slipped it over her head. Then I realized I had put it on backwards and pulled it off. As the dress came off, so did her hair. She was completely bald. But she was very nice about it and invited me to tea afterwards at the Ritz.

  Dahl Wolf was a horrible person, although if she loved you, she couldn’t do enough for you. Alexei Brodovitch liked Richard Avedon very much better than her, and she was very jealous. That was the time of the rise of Richard Avedon, who had showed up at the office, twenty-six years old, just out of the merchant marines. H
e was a little spot of a fellow, always hopping about.

  Avedon had a marvelous studio. He always had music playing and would serve tea in dainty white cups. Fred Astaire was often featured in the magazine because he was social, and Avedon was so pleased to photograph him. When he saw Fred Astaire used a necktie in place of a belt, he began doing the same thing.

  A bizarre Harper’s Bazaar photo shoot from 1950.

  He was wonderful at fashion photography, retouched the models’ faces so you could never see a wrinkle. When Anna Magnani was scheduled to be photographed, we went to see her at the Waldorf-Astoria. She came out with her hair all done up and said, “It’s taken me forty-nine years to get these wrinkles. I don’t want one taken out.” (On the other hand, when we photographed Bea Lillie, she complained, “Not only did you not take the wrinkles out, you put some in that weren’t there.”)

  We were guided and somewhat restricted by the Hearst organization, which was headquartered on 57th Street. Harper’s Bazaar reported on important literary, artistic, and theatrical figures and events of the period and was geared to this upscale, Waspy elite audience. But the Hearst people wanted to appeal to the mass audience, to have the circulation of Good Housekeeping.

  One time I had to take over for the literary editor, who was in the hospital, and I bought a poem to go as a filler in the last page of the magazine. Mrs. Snow called me into the office. “Do you know you have put a pornographic poem in this magazine? Look at this.” She pointed to a line in “The Postures of Love” by Louis Comfit: “He kissed her nape.”

  “Mrs. Snow, nape means ‘neck.’”

  “Oh.” It was 57th Street. They had called her attention to it.