Save Me the Plums

by Ruth Reichl

  “It’s a great party!” he was saying as David Chang reached around him to snag a piece of cheese.

  “Doc is so fucking cool!” David said. “Who do you know who has the fucking nickname Doc? If I had a nickname I would want it to be fucking Doc. How cool is Doc? I’m fucking Doc!”

  Doc smiled, looking elegant and embarrassed; a nearby reporter was taking down every word.

  “You’ve made Karen’s night,” I told him. “The hottest chef in the country wants to be called Fucking Doc. That’s bound to go viral.”

  Our newest publisher stood back, watching it all. After Giulio’s departure, nobody lasted long—Amy had stayed less than two months. Tom Hartman looked exhausted. “Good thing you threw the party now,” he said. “I have a feeling we won’t be doing this again.”

  “Really?” I looked at his tired face. “Are things that bad?”

  He nodded. “Nobody up in corporate wants to admit it, but we’re in a recession and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Especially for us.”

  “Why us?”

  The look he gave me said I was absurdly naïve. “C’mon, Ruth. If you’re Tiffany’s and you have to reduce your ad spend, who are you going to keep—Vogue or Gourmet? It’s a no-brainer. If you’re a cruise line, are you going to cut us or the Traveler? And think about appliance companies. Viking makes the lion’s share of its money on new buildings; what happens when the building stops? Times are tough and they’re going to get tougher.”

  I liked Tom enormously. He’d been Giulio’s number two and he was a smart, decent man with a fine sense of humor. He had an MBA from Wharton, a degree from Le Cordon Bleu, spoke fluent French, and loved to cook. In ordinary times he would have been the ideal choice for Gourmet, even though this was his first stint as a publisher. But these were not ordinary times.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I was on my fourth glass of wine, feeling both earnest and sentimental. “I’d do anything to save the magazine.”

  He patted my arm. “I’ll try to think of something.”

  The next morning I stood in the lobby, woozy and hungover, idly chatting with the editor of a fashion book while we waited for the elevator. “I’ve decided to elevate my personal profile in order to expand my book’s reach,” she said. My bark of laughter spiked my headache, but her words sounded so pompous. The woman whirled on me. “If you want to survive, sweetie, you’d better become a brand steward. Editor in chief is so last year.”

  That stopped me cold. I wasn’t entirely sure how to be a brand steward, but, terrified by what was happening to our once-robust magazine, I was willing to learn. Since Giulio’s departure, the revolving door had caused a precipitous decline in advertising, and as the ads vanished, editorial pages went with them. I could hardly believe the speed with which it happened, but each month there was less room for the articles we cared most about.

  I stopped in to see Tom. “Would it help,” I asked, “if I rolled out Brand Ruth?”

  He gave me a huge, relieved smile.

  * * *

  —

  THE TIMING WAS right. Nick had gone off to college, leaving me with a hollow, homesick feeling I could not shake. I’d expected to miss my son, but the depth of my devastation overwhelmed me. “We only got to have him for such a short time,” I moaned to Michael.

  “He’s not gone,” Michael said, “he’s just away for a while.” Remembering my own relief at leaving home, I had a hard time believing this. When I left at sixteen, I was gone for good. Why would Nick be different?

  “Because you’re not your mother,” Michael reminded me. “You’re not crazy. He’s not going to vanish. You’ll see. But in the meantime you’ll cope the same way you always do: by throwing yourself into your work.”

  He was right: It was what I’d always done and now that Nick was grown I regretted every minute I hadn’t spent with him. I thought of all the nights I’d stayed late at the office, when I could have been at home. All the business trips I’d taken. All the client dinners. If I had it to do over again, I thought, I’d do it differently. But the time was gone, and it was never coming back.

  I became the honorary chair for the Tenement Museum Gala, the Food Bank Gala, the March of Dimes Gala, the Great Chefs Dinner, the High Line Gala, the Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America.

  “Thousands of press impressions!” said Karen, plunking a book fat with clippings onto my desk.

  I went on the lecture circuit, staying up all night to research talks for Princeton, Columbia, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Oxford Symposium on Food.

  “Thousands more press impressions!” Karen sang out.

  I accepted awards: The Distinguished Journalism Award from the University of Missouri. The Matrix Award for Women in Media. The Genesis Award from the Humane Society. These too came festooned with media attention.

  Tom was thrilled. When a clue in the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle was “Food writer Ruth,” he reprinted the puzzle and sent it to clients with this note: “Gourmet’s editor in chief is a household name.”

  But becoming my own personal publicity machine did not make me happy. I loathed the constant self-promotion, and I hated the way it took me away from the magazine for increasingly long periods of time. These days it was Doc who met with writers and edited copy. Larry sent messages about personnel decisions and Richard emailed layouts, but I felt divorced from the day-to-day life of the magazine. In a crisis they called, but all the things I’d loved best about being the editor of Gourmet now happened around me. Even when I was at 4 Times Square, most of my time was devoted to ad sales and corporate meetings. I began dreading going into the office, and I thought about Paul Bocuse’s famous response when a reporter asked who did the cooking when the great chef was away. “The same person who cooks when I’m here,” Bocuse replied. It had always seemed like a reasonable answer, but now I wondered if it made him as miserable as it was making me.

  I began to notice the staff eyeing me warily, shooting me anguished looks. They understood that I’d fallen out of love with my job. Finally Sertl just came right out and baldly asked the question on everyone’s mind: “Are you planning to leave?”

  Appalled that my unhappiness was that obvious, I struggled to come up with a reassuring answer. Larry beat me to it. “Ruth’s not going anywhere,” he said. I waited for the zinger that was sure to follow; in one unforgettable exchange Larry had declared, “You’re not nearly as nice as you think you are.” What was he going to say now?

  “She might want to leave, but she won’t. She knows we’d all be in trouble, and Ruth wouldn’t do that to us.”

  I stared at him in astonishment. It was the kindest thing he’d ever said. He grew pink with embarrassment and added a coda. “Besides, she can’t afford to. She has a kid to put through college.” The laughter that followed was relieved; everybody knew it was the truth.

  Ads continued to decline. Jobs were frozen. The paper quality went down. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do a better job for you,” said Tom when they brought in yet another new publisher. His prediction had been correct: The recession was grimmer than anyone anticipated, and Gourmet suffered more than most. Tom’s replacement, Nancy Berger-Cardone, smiled brightly each month as she offered optimistic estimates of the number of ad pages she was certain to sell. And each month, still smiling, Nancy was forced to admit that the numbers were not what she’d hoped. There were no smiles on our side as we grimly tore the book apart, ripping out enough editorial pages to meet the shortfall. It was devastating to watch Gourmet dwindle, growing thinner every month. “It’s not the magazine of good living,” Doc said grimly, “it’s the pamphlet of good living.”

  “Layoffs will be next,” Larry said sourly.

  Karen, ever cheerful, came up with yet another way to raise Gourmet’s profile. “We’ll auction you off for charity dinne
rs. If you go for enough money, it will be news.”

  “More publicity?” asked Michael as he watched me dress for the first of these dinners. “Is it really worth it?”

  “These people paid a lot of money,” I said. “And it’s for a good cause.”

  “Are they interesting, at least?”

  I tried to remember. “It’s some Wall Street guy, his wife, and their friends. We’re going to Craftsteak; Tom Colicchio donated dinner.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come along?” It was a noble gesture; Michael would be miserable at such an event. “Just to lend you support?”

  “I appreciate the offer,” I said, “but you’d hate it.”

  That was surely true. They were beautiful, these people who’d bought me, tanned, toned, and wrapped in expensive clothing. Their teeth gleamed, their jewels winked, and their hair glistened in colors unknown in nature.

  The food was good, the talk polite. They asked endless questions about Gourmet, and I did my best to entertain them with amusing anecdotes about the magazine. I thought we were swimming along quite nicely until the man on my left threw down his fork and tossed me an angry glare. “You haven’t asked me a single question,” he snapped, “and I’m a lot more interesting than you are.”

  I looked at him, stung. “I’m sorry to be a disappointment. But you’re the one who bought dinner with me.”

  “It’s your loss,” he replied, turning away.

  Going home, I replayed the moment over and over, the way you can’t help touching a sore tooth. It made me wince every time. I thought about what Stevie would have done with that dinner, how he would have delighted in asking questions, getting their stories, adding them to his address book. I scrolled through my messages, looking for the man’s name, and googled him. Then I just sat there, staring at the screen: I was an idiot.

  Ashamed and embarrassed, I crept into bed, hoping Michael was asleep. But he sensed my distress and came instantly awake.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I groaned. “I was seated next to one of the most interesting figures on Wall Street and all I did was talk about myself. Brand Ruth might be good for Gourmet, but she’s turned me into an obnoxious fathead who believes her own press. I should have asked Bill Ackman a million questions.”

  “Who’s Bill Ackman?”

  “You know, that hedge-fund guy who’s always feuding with everyone. He gives money to good causes and he’s a fascinating man, but I was so full of myself that I blew the chance to get to know him.”

  “Well, he wanted to be there. You didn’t.”

  “That’s no excuse! Until I turned myself into a publicity machine I would have been eager to find out all about him, even if he was a jerk. He said it was my loss, and he’s right. Brand Ruth may be good for the magazine, but I don’t think very much of her.”

  The next day my publisher came up with yet another way to market Brand Ruth: Nancy persuaded American Airlines to sponsor a second television show. The shooting schedule would mean being away from the magazine for months at a time, which did not make me happy. But the deal was worth more than a million dollars to our bottom line, and there was no way I could possibly refuse.

  As Nancy’s team wrangled celebrities—Dianne Wiest, Jeffrey Wright, Tom Skerritt, Lorraine Bracco—I grew increasingly apprehensive. We’d be traveling the world on cooking adventures, and I worried that these divas would be impossible to please. By the time I left to shoot the first episode with Frances McDormand, I had worked myself into a state of high anxiety.

  It did not begin well. The movie star frowned while examining her palatial suite at Blackberry Farm in the Great Smoky Mountains, grumbling as she took in the enormous marble bathroom with its spacious dressing room and walk-in closets. She was openly displeased with the bedroom; she glared at the huge fireplace and seemed to consider the giant four-poster bed particularly offensive. The airy screened-in porch did not meet muster, and when she saw the little kitchen she snorted derisively. Whirling on the cameraman, who’d been filming the tour, Fran demanded, “Take me to your room. I want to see where you’re staying.”

  Alan shot me an exasperated glance; what had she been expecting? Did she really think his room was going to be better? He gave a world-weary shrug, as if to say, “Celebrities,” turned off the camera, and led her out the door.

  He tried going for drama. “This is all mine!” he announced, attempting a sweeping gesture to fling his door open. The door creaked, opened a tiny crack, then stopped, blocked by a mountain of camera equipment.

  “As I suspected!” Fran put her eye to the slit in the door, staring into the small, cramped room. “This is just wrong.” She stamped her foot. “You have to switch rooms with me. I certainly don’t need all that space and you can obviously use it.”

  Alan’s face became a comical mixture of amazement and disbelief. “C’mon,” she urged, “all you have to do is say yes. You know you’re going to be working harder than I am.” Then she saw my own face, which must have mirrored Alan’s. “What?” she asked.

  It was pure Fran. She likes to cook and came along on a lark, but our little show meant nothing to her. Nevertheless, she threw herself into the enterprise as if it was the most important assignment she’d ever accepted. Neither dirt nor heat nor rain fazed her. She picked peas and stuck her hands deep into the dirt, crowing when she came up with handfuls of potatoes. The day we went fishing, she waded hip-deep into the stream, shouting with delight when she caught a trout (and laughing even harder when I caught a tree). Faced with a swarm of bees, she stood very still while they dive-bombed her head, then dipped a curious finger into the honeycomb, put it in her mouth, and grinned.

  Fran was the anti-diva, so contrary to anyone’s idea of a movie star that we all forgot she was famous. Only later, as we dashed through the airport on our way home, was I reminded that Fran is a solid-gold celebrity: People stared openly, their mouths agape. When we heaved ourselves into our seats—we’d made the plane by seconds—the woman across the aisle fixed her eyes on Fran, refusing to remove them for a single second. Fran calmly ignored this until the woman leaned across the aisle to hiss in my ear, “Is that Frances McDormand?”

  I nodded.

  The woman scrabbled in her purse, looking for pen and paper. “Autograph!” she demanded, thrusting them at Fran.

  Fran frowned down at the paper for so long I thought she was going to refuse. At last she accepted the pen. “I’m just an actor, and no more interesting than you are.” She scribbled her name. “Probably not as interesting, actually. You should pay more attention to yourself and less to people like me. You’ll be better off that way.”

  And that, I thought, is the secret to happiness: There is no Brand Fran. Suddenly I knew exactly what I had to do. It was time to shrink my profile. Gourmet would have to make do with plain old Ruth.

  WALL STREET WAS IN TURMOIL; people were losing their homes, unemployment rising higher every day. The stock market crashed. Newsstand sales plummeted—people give up magazines when times are tough—and we racked our brains trying to dream up an issue that people could not pass up.

  “What about Paris?” I suggested. “The last Paris issue flew off the newsstand.”

  “And who”—Larry’s voice was dry—“can afford to go to Paris these days?”

  I thought of myself at seventeen, sleeping in a tiny room, wandering the streets, happy on little more than bread and cheese. “What if we did Paris on a shoestring?”

  Doc interrupted my reverie. “Do you really think Gourmet readers want to go to Paris and pinch pennies?”

  “You don’t need money to fall in love with Paris. Think about Hemingway’s moveable feast: It had nothing to do with luxury. This could be the perfect moment to remind readers of the other side of the city.”

  “I see your point.” Doc seemed to warm to the idea. “Nost
algia sells….”

  Larry remained unmoved. “And who, exactly, is going to write this story? I can hear the phone call now. ‘Here’s a couple hundred bucks; buy yourself an economy ticket, stay in a cheap hotel, and drink rotgut in the park.’ How are you going to find a writer who wants to do that?”

  “I’ll do it!” I’d had no idea I was going to say that until the words had left my mouth.

  Larry stared at me, incredulous. “Oh, come on!” He was at his most scathing. “You’re not a Berkeley hippie anymore. Can you even remember the last time you flew economy? Do you really think you’re going to enjoy sleeping on lumpy mattresses and eating in bargain bistros?”

  I thought of Fran. I thought of Truman. “I guess I’ll find out,” I replied.

  When we called our Paris correspondent, he was wildly enthusiastic about the idea. “Your timing is perfect!” cried Alec Lobrano. “There’s a new energy here. Young chefs are moving out to the double-digit arrondissements—the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth—to keep costs down. The most interesting new restaurants are in the old working-class areas of Belleville and along the Canal Saint-Martin. Even the old bouillons like Chartier, who’ve been serving solid cheap food since the days of Toulouse-Lautrec, are hot again. Right now you can eat very well on practically nothing.”

  “I’m sure you can. And that’s fine,” Bill Sertl interjected. “But what about sleeping well? Paris hotels are expensive. Do you really think you can find an economy hotel good enough for Gourmet readers?”

  “Probably not,” I replied. “But I bet you can.”

  “You want me to come with you?” He sounded slightly appalled.