Save Me the Plums

by Ruth Reichl

  Florio ordered a stunningly expensive Italian red wine to accompany the caviar and proceeded to regale me with sensational tales of Si. Most were scurrilous and many untrue, but I nodded, pretending to believe the myths about Si’s scintillating private life.

  The business stories were easier to swallow. Steve began by bragging about all the money he’d lost during his tenure at The New Yorker. “Si didn’t mind,” he said airily. “There have been times when Condé Nast couldn’t meet payroll and he simply wrote a check.” He leaned conspiratorially toward me, his forehead almost touching mine. “After I moved up, my brother Tom became the publisher of The New Yorker for a while; we used to argue about which of us had bigger losses.”

  “You boasted about losing Si’s money?” I was incredulous. “Didn’t he mind?”

  He waved a hand, batting the thought away. “Si doesn’t mind about the money; he just wants to be the best. But don’t think you can cross him; he really hates to lose. Has anyone told you about the time one of the fashion books published a negative article about a major Italian label?”

  I shook my head.

  “The designer retaliated by pulling his ads from every Condé Nast publication.” Steve picked up his glass, gave it a swirl, and took an appreciative sip of the Gaja Barolo. “Si was furious. It was the editor’s fault, but Si punished the publisher. He made him fly to Milan and undo the damage. Told him not to return unless he succeeded.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair,” I said.

  “Fair?” He laughed. “Si has no boundaries when it comes to business. Has Gina told you about her father’s funeral?”

  “No.”

  He gave me a wicked grin. “During the service Si berated her about lost ad pages.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “He did.” Florio took another sip of the deep-red wine. “But don’t worry—that will never happen to you. He behaves very differently toward the editorial side. He gives you all a lot of rope.” He frowned resentfully down into his glass, then looked up, adding cheerily, “And then he lets you hang yourselves.”

  I looked at the salt-and-pepper hair, the big mustache, and he suddenly reminded me of Groucho Marx at his most sardonic. I wondered what had happened to the editor of the fashion magazine.

  “Dessert?” he asked. I shook my head, but from across the room Julian was approaching with an extravagant cloud of fluff. Setting it before us, he leaned in to whisper, “Cotton candy gives our guests their childhood back. It’s the only thing they don’t have.” Then he went gliding off to the next table.

  Florio took a huge handful of spun sugar and stuffed it into his mouth. “What Julian doesn’t understand,” he said, “is that this is so much better than my childhood.”

  WHEN I TOLD TRUMAN I needed a new art director, he was unsurprised. “You’ve done twelve fine issues,” he told me, “but your covers have been weak and your newsstand sales are terrible.”

  He didn’t need to tell me that I was being judged on newsstand numbers; sales reports arrived on my desk at the start of every week, and I spent a great deal of time trying to make our covers appealing.

  The problem was that, each time, Felicity would nod sagely and then totally misinterpret every word I’d said. I showed her a W. Eugene Smith photograph I loved, of a peasant woman standing in a field, wearing a radiant smile as she offers her cupped hands to the camera; you can’t see what she’s holding, but I’ve always imagined it’s a mushroom of some kind. To me it captures all the generosity of cooks; it’s as if she’s saying, “Look at the treasure I’ve pulled out of the earth just for you.” What Felicity shot was a skinny young model in a pink cashmere sweater, holding out a handful of berries. And so it went, month after month. I didn’t like the covers, but more to the point, the readers didn’t either.

  I probably could have put up with that, had Felicity not made so many enemies at the magazine. Her feud with Romulo made everybody so miserable that I finally asked her to try being more tactful.

  “I didn’t come here to make friends,” she snapped. And that was it for me: I wanted a happy workplace.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Truman said now, “that you and Diana LaGuardia might be well matched. She’s been at the Traveler for a while, and she’s getting restless. I think you’d like each other. Shall I arrange an introduction?”

  Change, at Condé Nast, does not dawdle. The next morning I met Diana for breakfast. I had no trouble spotting her as she crossed the Algonquin dining room; the stylish middle-aged woman might have had ART DIRECTOR tattooed across her forehead. Her pale, clever face was bare of makeup, her dark hair was streaked with gray, and she was dressed entirely in black. Her short skirt revealed excellent legs and feet encased in hip lace-up oxfords; in a time when most women teetered about on very high heels, hers was a definite fashion statement.

  “Is your father the book designer?” she asked, and immediately began talking type. Of course I liked her. She ordered a big breakfast—potatoes, eggs, and sausages—leaning into her food with unembarrassed appetite. I liked that too.

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT PERFECT TIMING,” said Gina when I introduced our new art director. “Our annual sales conference starts tomorrow. The reps are coming from all across the country, and they’ll want to meet you.”

  I watched the two women circle each other, almost sniffing the air with suspicion. Gina, carefully coiffed and conservatively dressed in an understated suit, was cool and slightly aloof; she stood as far away as possible as she proffered her small hand. When Diana grabbed it, I wondered how my publisher would react. Diana didn’t just shake your hand: An alpha dog, she sent a message.

  Gina calmly reclaimed her hand, her face revealing nothing. “You could kick off our sales meeting,” she said with a touch of hauteur, “by explaining your design philosophy to the staff.”

  Gina’s annual meetings were legendary; it was the one thing on which she spared no expense. My first year she was hugely pregnant, but that did not prevent her from renting a fleet of motorcycles and roaring down Fifth Avenue on an enormous Harley. Another year she hired a voice coach, disguised herself as the Iron Lady, and addressed her staff in a perfect imitation of Margaret Thatcher. Once she floated in, scantily clad as Madonna, and sang “Material Girl.”

  But this year Gina outdid herself. She’d chosen Enter the Dragon as her theme. Shamelessly appropriating a cultural trope, she arrived at the office dressed in Chinese silks, her face painted chalk white and her head covered in a stiffly lacquered black wig, leading a troupe of entertainers carrying an enormous paper dragon. Banging drums, they went cavorting through 4 Times Square, bestowing luck.

  But Diana was the one who roared.

  “Let me”—she climbed onto the podium of Condé Nast’s cozy corporate theater, shook back her hair, and straightened her short black skirt—“explain what I do.” Diana was not tall, but she projected a distinct air of authority. “Our biggest problem is that advertisers are like cockroaches. We no sooner create a design than they colonize it, appropriating it in an attempt to make their ads look like editorial. So we have to keep changing what we do. It’s my job to stay one step ahead of them.”

  A gasp ran through the room. The reps all looked appalled and I turned to Gina; even beneath the makeup I could see that her face had gone pale. “Please tell me she didn’t just call the advertisers cockroaches!”

  “She did!” I laughed, delighted by Diana’s boldness. Gina shot me a glare of pure loathing. It was one more proof that I had taken Truman’s words to heart and erected a firewall between advertising and editorial. One more proof that as far as I was concerned the magazine’s economic health was not my problem.

  But Diana, like most art directors, considered advertisers her mortal enemies. They were, she was convinced, intent on destroying the beauty of her work. She was always looking for new w
ays to get the better of them.

  Never one to mince words, Diana stalked the halls of Condé Nast with the confidence of a creature who knows she’s in her natural habitat. On her first day she marched into my office and tossed the current issue on my desk. “We can definitely do better.” She opened the magazine and turned to “Gourmet Every Day,” the section of quick, simple recipes we’d invented to overcome critiques of our recipes as too complicated. “You’ve been working backward.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She pointed to the stiff rectangular photographs and long lines of text. “The copy is dictating the visuals. That’s fine in the front of the book. But the well belongs to the art, and you should be working the other way around.”

  She’d lost me.

  “Come. Let me show you.” I followed her into the art department, where she stood at the light box, gesturing at layouts, talking with her hands. She gave off the clean, slightly medicinal scent of nicotine gum, which had a strangely sensual quality. “We’re going to fit the recipes right into the photographs.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If we get finished recipes from the cooks before we start shooting, we’ll know exactly how much space the type will take up. Then Romulo can set up the photograph so the recipe literally becomes part of the picture. See? It will fit right inside. We’ll waste less space and end up with a more dynamic page.”

  I was still lost, so Diana forged ahead. She and Romulo—thrilled that his nemesis was gone—began collaborating, and when Diana showed me the final result, I was stunned. The images were now married to the words, giving the pages a loose rhythm that invited you to cook. “What do you think?”

  I looked at the picture she was holding: orange cream meringues splashed with a chocolate sauce that dripped so deliciously down the page I reached out a finger, thinking to take a taste. “I love it!”

  Diana grinned and ran her hand across the image. I thought of my father: She was caressing the page as if the magazine were whispering secrets through her fingers, secrets she alone could hear. Even the little smile she wore resembled his. “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” I asked.

  Diana shrugged. “I’ve never worked at a food book.” It wasn’t arrogance; she simply loved her work. Her redesign was clean and simple: The pages didn’t draw attention to themselves, but each time I looked at them I heard my father’s voice. “I want all traces of my work to vanish,” he once told me, explaining that he was most successful when you did not notice the design. “All I want people to feel,” he’d said, “is that they’ll keep turning the pages because they’re so easy to read.

  “Now, book jackets,” he’d continued, “are a different matter. They’re supposed to catch your eye and keep it. Like magazine covers, they’re mostly advertising. And that,” he admitted ruefully, “has never been my strong suit.”

  I worried that Diana was the same: better at the quiet interior than the loud, eye-catching cover. As the months passed I worried even more. Magazines make the bulk of their money in the fourth quarter, and I stressed about those end-of-the-year issues. Diana had encouraged Romulo to create a beautiful still life for the September produce issue, and its quiet beauty had performed well on the newsstand, but for October we needed something bolder. “Do you have any ideas for the restaurant issue?” I asked. “Last year’s cover was a disaster.”

  That was putting it mildly. Laurie had dubbed Felicity’s effort “Hitler youth at dinner,” and the public obviously concurred: The issue racked up the worst newsstand sales figures in Gourmet’s history. “This year we need sales to be really strong.”

  “I do have an idea.” I couldn’t read the expression on Diana’s face, but it looked a lot like mischief. “I want to find a really handsome chef and get him to hold a giant fish. The bigger the better.”

  “We could ask Rocco DiSpirito,” I mused. “He’s handsome and talented—and kind of vain about the weight he’s just lost. Do you think he’d do it?”

  Diana stared at me. “Are you crazy? There’s not a chef in America who wouldn’t jump at this chance.”

  She was right about Rocco. Casting the fish, however, proved more difficult. It couldn’t be any old cold-blooded creature with fins; this one required an impeccable pedigree. It had to be beautiful. It also had to be unendangered, unimported, and sustainable. Not to mention very, very large.

  Diana finally found her fish, a sleek creature nearly six feet long. Elegant as a model, the tilefish had lovely pale skin, clear eyes, and an extremely sassy tail.

  But Diana fretted over the pose; how should Rocco hold his piscine friend? In the end she had him dance with the fish, making it look more like his partner than something he planned to put on your plate. The image was romantic. It made you look. Then it made you laugh. And then it made you look again.

  “I wonder what Truman will say?” As Diana handed me the neatly framed photograph, I detected a strange note in her voice.

  When I handed Truman the picture, he took one look and dropped it so quickly it was as if it had burned his fingers. I looked down at the chef with the fish as Truman began backing away. “No, no, no,” he moaned. He had turned slightly green. “Every magazine editor knows you can’t put a dead fish on the cover.”

  Every art director must know it too.

  “It’s the first rule of magazines. Dead fish are a curse. The issue will never sell.”

  “But it’s such a beautiful fish.”

  “You can’t put a dead fish on the cover!” As he stubbornly repeated the phrase, I began to understand what Diana was up to: She was testing my mettle.

  “I’ll make you a bet.” Diana had given me new confidence, and I was not about to let her down. I looked into Truman’s unhappy face. “One hundred dollars says this cover sells more than last year.”

  He returned my stare. He looked down at the cover. “Last year, you might remember, was a newsstand disaster.”

  “The year before, then.”

  He looked at the cover one more time, studying it with great care. “You’re on,” he said at last.

  That left Si. To my distress, I had to be out of town when it was time to present the upcoming issue to the bigwigs in the building. That meant Laurie had the unenviable task of introducing the boss to the fish. “You have to call me,” I said, “the minute the meeting’s over. I want to know exactly what happens.”

  “Si was dozing,” she reported, “but when I showed them the cover he sat bolt upright and said, ‘You can’t put a fish on the cover.’ ”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Ruth likes it.’ And I just kept repeating that. Over and over. They all hated the cover, but nobody demanded that we change it.

  “I kept invoking your name,” she continued, “and I thought we were home free.” I wondered if I would have had the strength to withstand that kind of pressure. “I turned to leave, and just as I reached the door Si said, ‘Come with me.’ ”

  “Oh, no!” Such a thing had never happened to me.

  “He led me into Truman’s office,” she continued, “and threw the cover on the desk. Truman looked up and Si said exactly five words. ‘Have you considered this carefully?’ ”

  “What did Truman say?”

  “ ‘Yes.’ ”

  “That’s all?”

  “That was it. It was really fascinating, like they have this unspoken means of communication.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Si picked up the cover, handed it to me, and nodded once.”

  “Oh, God.” I was horrified. I had not realized I was putting Truman on the line. “This issue better sell. A lot.”

  I worried about that cover for the entire month, and once it was printed I haunted the newsstands. The piles seemed to be going down, but I couldn’t be sure. The night before the
first newsstand report, I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep, and the next morning I got to the office early.

  Truman had beaten me there.

  Sitting on my desk were five crisp twenty-dollar bills. There was also a note. “Si and I have been talking; we think you should forget about turkey this year. Just put a fish on your November cover.”

  I picked up the bills and stood staring down at them, thinking how different this was from the last time I’d gambled on a fish.

  A few years earlier, still at the Times, I’d submitted three fish-centric reviews to the James Beard Foundation for the restaurant criticism award. I didn’t have much hope—Alan Richman, GQ’s critic, always won—so it was a thrill to learn that I was, at last, a finalist. I could not, of course, blow my anonymity by attending an event filled with chefs, so the editor of the dining section, Rick Flaste, went in my place.

  In those days the Beards were not nearly as flashy as they have since become, and in that pre-social-media era, there was no outlet to report the winners. Rick said nothing, so I figured Alan had once again taken home the trophy and I forgot all about it. I was, therefore, astonished a few days later when I got a congratulatory note from the Beard Foundation.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I’d won?” I asked Rick.

  “Didn’t I?” he replied carelessly. “I guess I forgot.”

  And that, I thought, was the difference between the Times and Condé Nast. To the Times I was just a food writer who didn’t really count. Despite my prominent position there, I’d never felt like more than a cog in a vast machine, someone who could be easily replaced. It was different at Condé Nast; they took what I was doing seriously. To me, those twenty-dollar bills represented more than money: They were proof positive that Truman had my back.

  “THIS IS VERY GOOD,” ROBIN breathed as she handed me the thickly embossed invitation. “The only other editors invited to Si’s birthday are AnnaGraydonDavidPaige.” She ran the names of Condé Nast’s most important editors together, seeming to consider my elevation into this exalted group a point of personal pride. “The invitation says no gifts, but what are you going to wear?”