A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  After Nicola had been at the St. Regis for a few weeks without revealing larcenous tendencies, a fellow worker approached him one night and asked, “Hey, how come you don’t valise anything around here?” Nicola explained that he did not have a refrigerator in the single-room apartment he rented in the Bronx, and since he also lived alone and nibbled on the job, he had no reason to practice valising. “You’d better find a reason,” the man said, adding that otherwise Nicola might be seen as behaving disrespectfully toward his coworkers. And so Nicola became a valise, doing as the others did, coming to work often with an empty shopping bag folded inside his shirt, or a canvas carrier strung over his arm, into which he might later deposit assorted vegetables or a few filet mignons or whatever he thought would be appreciated by the wife of his landlord in the Bronx, a man who had a large family to support and who had always been lenient regarding overdue rent.

  One night, Nicola was riding home on the subway, standing next to a St. Regis busboy who, unknown to Nicola, was carrying several raw eggs in the pockets of his jacket and trousers. Suddenly, as the subway lurched and screeched to a halt, one of the passengers lost his balance and fell against the boy, cracking open all the eggs and causing a gluey mess to trickle down the boy’s legs, onto his shoes, and then across the floor—sending Nicola and the other passengers into quick retreat. Nicola later wondered why the boy would be stuffing his pockets with things so fragile and so relatively inexpensive as four or five eggs. It was certainly worth the trouble to walk off with a few filets, or a tin of caviar, or occasionally a bottle of cognac, as he had done—but fewer than a half dozen eggs? A few nights later, just before closing time in the St. Regis kitchen, Nicola watched as another worker inserted only a single onion, a piece of garlic, and some parsley into his coat pocket, and Nicola asked him on the way out, “Why bother taking that stuff?” “My wife needs it,” the man said. “It isn’t worth much,” Nicola replied. “Yes,” the man said, “but my wife would have to buy it. A penny here, a penny there, it all adds up to dollars I don’t have to spend and the hotel will never miss.”

  The St. Regis workers who were employed outside the kitchen seemed to be far more flagrant as freebooters than were Nicola’s coworkers. A few of the former once arranged for the permanent disappearance from the hotel of a number of Persian rugs that had been set aside to be cleaned and repaired; on another occasion, three pianos in need of tuning were carefully rolled down the hotel’s ramp and placed within a truck that would never return with them. There were investigations by the management, but Nicola never knew of a case in which an investigation produced incriminating evidence. And he believed that the workers more or less justified their valising as compensation for their lowly wages and also as a reaction to the great wealth, privilege, and waste that they saw all around them, as personified by the hotel’s guests.

  Coming from a family background in which little was spent and nothing was wasted, Nicola was overwhelmed by the bountiful squandering that was evident whenever he and his coworkers began to clear the tables in the ballroom after each banquet and then returned to the kitchen carrying plates of uneaten food, and several uncorked bottles half-filled with champagne, and more flowers than would adorn a mafioso’s funeral, and bundles of decorative crepe paper that was partly torn and speckled with dried wax, and dozens of frivolous and forgotten party favors, and countless chips of delicate dessert cookies that Nicola sampled and that sweetened his appetite while reducing his scruples about leaving the hotel later with a few uncooked chunks of beef wrapped in tinfoil and tucked under his hat. Furthermore, he reminded himself that what he stole was not out of his own greed, but for the benefit of the needy family of his landlord; a second reason that valising seemed harmless to Nicola was his belief that the hotel’s executive chef and the other department heads were aware of what was going on within their domains and they quietly condoned it as long as it did not threaten their positions with their superiors in the main office.

  To be sure, there had been a few incidents that had taxed the patience of the normally easygoing chef Nicola worked under, and such an occasion was the theft of one of the two baby lambs reserved for a private dinner in the Louis XV Suite that was to be hosted by the hotel’s owner, Vincent Astor. Although the chef’s follow-up investigation indicated that no one in the kitchen had been responsible, the experience had motivated within him an uncharacteristic surge of scrupulousness; and a few days after the baby lamb’s disappearance, as the chef was saying good night to one of his cooks—a cook whom the chef had earlier observed placing a pound of butter under his hat—the chef said to the cook, “Wait a minute, don’t go yet. I need to talk to you. Let’s go into my office.”

  The chef’s office was a small glass-partitioned room located next to a boiler tank. The room was very hot, since the overhead fans had been turned off and the boiler was still hissing steam. The cook, wearing a heavy overcoat and porkpie hat that was tilted forward over his round and swarthy face, sat down in front of the chef’s desk and waited. The chef, after seating himself and unbuttoning his shirt collar, opened a drawer to his desk. He removed a few pages from a folder and spread the pages in front of him. As he read, he began to fiddle with the steelrimmed glasses that rested on the nose of his raw-boned, ruddy face. He removed the glasses and wiped the foggy lenses slowly and repeatedly with a linen cocktail napkin. He paid no attention to the cook. With his glasses back on, the chef resumed reading.

  The cook unbuttoned his overcoat and remained seated, waiting patiently, perspiring noticeably. The chef, after reading for about five minutes, reached across the desk for the phone and dialed a number. Someone soon responded on the other end, and for the next ten minutes the chef chatted in a friendly fashion with this person about matters unrelated to the hotel. The cook was now squirming in the seat and, with both hands on the rim of his hat, he pulled downward, trying to reduce the flow of the unctuous yellowy liquid that was trickling down from his forehead and dripping from his earlobes onto the collar of his coat.

  The chef chatted on for another three or four minutes. After hanging up the phone, he looked directly at the cook, whose face was now glistening thickly with a kind of lava flow of melted butter.

  “You know,” the chef said, “you don’t look good. I think you should hurry home and call a doctor.”

  The cook nodded and, after easing himself up, again pulled down on his hat and said good night.

  8

  NICOLA SPAGNOLO SPENT THE BETTER PART OF FIVE YEARS WORKING at the St. Regis. As he gradually mastered English, having taken lessons at a community center in the Bronx, he found extra work as a waiter or kitchen helper in other restaurants during his off-hours from the hotel. Most of these restaurants were undistinguished places located along the side streets of mid-Manhattan, but sometimes, aided by the fact that he could speak French, he was able to fill in as an assistant waiter at the Pavillon. Nicola would never speak a word of Italian inside the Pavillon, knowing that Henri Soulé did not approve of it any more than he did the Italian custom of cooking with oil instead of butter. All the elite restaurants in New York were French, and Soulé was a Francophile in the extreme. Working at the Pavillon was for Nicola a prideful and humbling experience.

  Everything about the restaurant bespoke the best and the most expensive—the glassware was Baccarat, the centerpieces vaunted with long-stemmed roses (three thousand freshly cut roses were inserted every week), and the restaurant’s silver serving wagons, exclusively designed in Paris with built-in burners and chafing dishes, and equipped with ball bearings, rolled smoothly along the Pavillon’s carpeting and could turn on a dime. Mr. Soulé was constantly in motion between the dining room and kitchen, overseeing the cooking and the serving while being assisted by his cadre of watchful captains and his meticulous and vigilant French chef. The underlings working at the Pavillon knew well that the conditions there were not very conducive to valising.

  During this time, Nicola’s fourth year since jumping ship
, he was having an affair with an adventuresome and impetuous young woman from Texas who worked behind the St. Regis’s reservation desk. A year later, in 1960, she encouraged him to revisit Italy. She accompanied him on the trip, and the two of them decided suddenly to get married while visiting his home village, thus accelerating the process by which he would later gain his American citizenship. But except for the fact that he and his wife were both working at the St. Regis, they discovered soon enough that they had little else in common, and their period of marital cohabitation lasted only a few years and was characteristically tempestuous. Although they would not get around to finalizing their divorce until the late 1960s, Nicola had moved out of their marital apartment in Queens in 1963 and at the same time severed all connections with the St. Regis. This is when he began working with some regularity at Portofino, owned by his Genoese friend Alfredo Viazzi, and it was there that he became acquainted with Elaine Kaufman, and then subsequently joined her uptown after she had started Elaine’s.

  But after ten years as her headwaiter, the couple began to disagree on so many matters that Nicola decided in 1974 to quit Elaine’s and open a restaurant of his own. He quietly revealed this to me late one evening when I was in the restaurant dining alone and Elaine was in the back, having an after-dinner drink with her playwright friend Jack Richardson and a few others playing backgammon.

  I was very upset by Nicola’s news.

  “You can’t quit,” I said. “This book I’m doing takes place in Elaine’s, and you’re a main character. You’ll both get lots of free publicity when I finish it.”

  “I can’t take her shit anymore,” he said. He was leaning over my shoulder, speaking directly into my left ear while clearing the table.

  “You can take it,” I insisted, looking up from my brandy glass, which was half-filled with the green crème de menthe that Elaine had sent over earlier. “You’ve been sniping at one another every night for ten years. And then you always kiss and make up.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, walking off with an armload of dishes.

  At the time, I was confident that I had convinced him to remain, at least for a few months. By then, I believed, I could finish my research at Elaine’s and concentrate on the writing. What I had in mind varied from week to week, but I always saw the presence of Nicola and Elaine as vital to what I thought I was doing, which was to present in book form the panorama of a place that, in addition to being a restaurant, was also a way station for writers escaping the blank pages of overdue books, and a therapy center for unemployed actors allergic to solitude, and a halfway house for husbands between wives, and a rendezvous spot for men and women who, as evening approached, were not sure with whom they wished to dine, or with whom they wished to sleep after they dined, or even if they wished to sleep. It was a restaurant for insomniacs and the indecisive, a late-night talk show without cameras and microphones or commercial interruptions. Here I saw gangsters, police commissioners, and clergymen ordering dinner at separate tables but on the same night, and here I observed elegantly dressed women walking in with theater programs tucked into their handbags and pausing at the bar while their tuxedoed escorts were being delayed outside by an aggressive pair of panhandlers. I had seen chauffeured moguls making their grand entrances into Elaine’s one step ahead of a federal indictment or a skip into Chapter 11, and a porno actress wearing a Laura Ashley dress give a birthday party for her two nieces and their young friends, spending the better part of the evening correcting their table manners. Among the customers at Elaine’s had been members of the Beatles, the Black Panthers, the New York Yankees, and Hell’s Angels. A young muscleman named Arnold Schwarzenegger came in for dinner one night and presented Elaine with an inscribed copy of the newly published book Pumping Iron, in which he was featured. On another occasion, Jackie Gleason walked in, and before joining his friends at a table, he stood behind the bar and entertained the crowd with his famous “Joe the Bartender” routine from his television series. Jazz musicians would stroll in and pound the keys on Elaine’s piano, which had a cappuccino machine on top. Elaine’s also lured other restaurateurs—Vincent Sardi of Sardi’s, Danny Lavezzo of P. J. Clarke’s, and Ken Aretsky of the “21” Club—who while eating tried to conceal the fact that their eyes were roving around the room, counting the house.

  All these bits and pieces of information were in my notes, along with much more of the same, and sometimes I feared that what I was collecting was too lighthearted and insubstantial for a full-length book—too replete with table-hopping scenes featuring famous people making cameo appearances; it was as if I were interested in adapting my material for a stage review or a musical comedy. I could almost imagine it on Broadway with songs by Stephen Sondheim—A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Elaine’s, starring a hefty actress who could sing and dance as gracefully as the lumpish Zero Mostel while surrounded by a chorus of black-tied waiters kicking up their heels and spinning trays above their heads. At other times, I was satisfied with how my research was going, reminding myself that I was progressing as I had when doing books in the past, sucking up massive amounts of trifling details as indiscriminately as a vacuum cleaner, and then later sorting it all out with care.

  However, if Nicola Spagnolo left Elaine’s to open his own restaurant, I did foresee procedural problems for my work in progress. I could, of course, present the story entirely from Elaine Kaufman’s vantage point, doing a full-length portrait of her and her place in the manner that Joseph Wechsberg had done in his book about Henri Soulé and the Pavillon. But then my book might turn out to be more Elaine’s than mine, more a biography of her as a famous woman than about me as a writer in search of a story set in the world of a restaurant, the only place where I had witnessed my father being happy.

  When Nicola went ahead and quit Elaine’s two nights after our talk, infuriating Elaine and making news in the tabloids, I resigned myself to putting the project away for a while, delegating it to the back of my filing cabinet. With the exit of Nicola from my location site, I had lost one of the pair of clashing, colorful characters that I had been counting upon to lend a perception of stability to what was still forming in my mind. I had likened the presence of Elaine and Nicola to two poles supporting my tent show, two ringmasters around whom my rotating cast of characters could revolve, two alter egos through whom I might reflect my views as an outsider in both the mainstream of America and the Italy of my ancestry.

  Elaine was a contemporary of mine, the only smart Jewish woman I’d ever met who had an affinity for Italian men. We were both newcomers to Manhattan at the same time, and, though we did not meet until she started Elaine’s, we lived a block apart during the mid-1950s in Greenwich Village, hung out in many of the same sawdust-floored bars, attended many of the same poetry readings, listened to the same music on the jukebox, and, remaining residents of the city for the rest of our lives, we similarly appreciated and responded to what E. B. White called “the vibrations of great times and tall deeds.”

  Nicola Spagnolo was my Italian insider in the restaurant trade, my “down-and-out” Orwellian wanderer whose fugitive lifestyle fascinated me and that as a writer I intended to emulate vicariously. Nicola and I had established a sense of familiarity and kinship shortly after we had first met at Elaine’s, and I think this was reinforced by the fact that we strongly resembled each other physically. The regulars at Elaine’s often mentioned this, asking if we two were related. Our features and profiles were strikingly similar, both of us having large brown eyes and Roman noses and chiseled cheekbones that gave us, in repose, the brooding, pensive expression often projected in the posed photos of matadors. Our dark hair was graying at the temples in the same place and was thinning equally at the crown as we entered our forties; and in the ten years that followed at Elaine’s, neither of us had noticeably gained weight. He commented admiringly on the suits I wore into the restaurant, the tailoring done by my father or my Italian cousin in Paris, and since Nicola was my size, he often reminded me that if
I should die before him, he would like to inherit my wardrobe.

  Within weeks of his departure from Elaine’s, I was on a plane to California to resume my work on what was to become Thy Neighbors Wife. But during my regular visits to New York, I continued to see Elaine Kaufman (her new headwaiter was another Italian she had known from her Village days at Portofino, Elio Guaitolini), and I also remained in contact with Nicola Spagnolo, whose restaurant—Nicola’s, at 146 East 84th Street—Elaine found irritatingly close to her own place north of Eighty-eighth, and she also alleged, through her attorney, that Nicola was trying to steal her customers.

  Fortunately for him, and a main factor in his successful defense, was the lack of any evidence that he had made overtures to her patrons; he had not mailed them circulars, nor made phone calls, nor otherwise informed them that he was opening a place of his own. What he did do, however, though it was difficult to criminalize, was decorate the walls of Nicola’s with framed photographs depicting several of the authors and cultural figures he had met at Elaine’s, and like moths to bright light, many of these people were drawn to him, but never in such numbers on any given evening, nor with any consistency in the following months or years, that would threaten the continuing popularity and prosperity of Elaine Kaufman’s business. Whatever trade she lost, she replaced with other customers to whom she offered front tables and gratuitous cordials, and, moreover, it was soon clear that the two restaurants functioned differently and were not dependent on the same type of loyal patronage.