A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  Jackline Ho and Dr. Jong had never met, nor had I ever tried to arrange it, believing that what these two assimilated Asians needed least in New York was an introduction to each other. It was not only that I assumed that they lacked compatibility—Dr. Jong was reticent, refined, and sagacious; Ms. Ho was assertive, streetwise, and capricious—but it seemed to me that in their social and professional lives they preferred to associate almost exclusively with non-Chinese New Yorkers, and this was apparently consistent in their choices of partnerships in marriage. Jackline Ho’s two husbands, though differing in their sexual orientation, were both American-born, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, while Dr. Jong’s two wives were both American-born and Jewish.

  “He was hung up on Jewish girls,” wrote his first wife, the author Erica (née Mann) Jong, in her 1973 best-selling novel, Fear of Flying. The main male character in the book (the heroine’s husband) is Dr. Bennett Wing, a Chinese-American psychoanalyst who “practically never sweats” and has “long, thin fingers” and “hairless balls” and a “lovely swivel to his hips when he screwed.” While I am of course aware that works of fiction are offered as products of a writer’s imagination, it nevertheless seemed to me, knowing Dr. Allan Jong as I did, including when he was naked—we often showered together after playing tennis at the Seventh Regiment Armory’s indoor club on Park Avenue—that the fictional figure of Dr. Bennett Wing in Fear of Flying bore a close physical resemblance to my tennis partner Dr. Allan Jong, whom I knew to have hairless testicles, fingers that were long and thin, a markedly swivel-hipped motion as he ran around the tennis court, and, while he doggedly pursued every shot, he practically never sweat.

  I had befriended Jackline Ho about twenty years after I had met Dr. Jong. I had been given her private New York telephone number by her second husband, the heterosexual one, in 1995, three years after their divorce. This husband was J. Z. Morris, the tall and blondish forty-five-year-old land developer based in Sarasota who had acquired 206 East 63rd Street in 1973. He believed she might be helpful to me in what I was trying to write after I had put aside the Bobbitt material in the latter part of 1994, when I had revived my interest in writing a nonfiction novel set within the five-story brick structure at 206 East 63rd Street, which I had privately identified as the “Willy Loman of buildings in New York.” J. Z. Morris had gradually converted it into a modern commercial property in which the upper three floors were rented out to tenants using the space for offices, studios, or showrooms, while the lower two floors and the basement were, of course, designed to accommodate a two-tiered dining establishment, several of which had by now come and gone.

  During Jackie Ho’s thirteen years of marriage to J. Z. Morris, beginning in 1979, she occasionally helped her husband in overseeing the property, not infrequently taking it upon herself (since her penthouse apartment was a few doors away and she was untimidly mercenary in matters of business) to pursue and admonish those tenants who were habitually late in paying the rent. Following her amicable divorce from Morris in 1992—so amicable that he continued to stay with her when visiting New York and was welcomed as well as her houseguest in Hawaii and Hong Kong—she continued to assist him in looking after the old building at 206 East 63rd. What I hoped to get from her for use in my book, which was tentatively entitled The Building, was some interesting information about the tenants she had come to know during her years as the rent collector and manager of the property—insights and anecdotes that might add to the research I had already done, and might further enliven my narrative as I sought to describe this place as if it were a multiplex movie house, a five-story structure layered with real-life dramas, comedies, romances, and mysteries. If I dug deeply enough and interviewed enough people, I often reminded myself as I fantasized, I might be able to find here, at this single address, along this shadowed side street in the middle of Manhattan, a story line that would span the entire twentieth century.

  I saw my story as beginning during the horse and buggy era of Frederick J. Schillinger, and then advancing into the motorized age of Frank Catalano (who, as you remember, purchased the storage business from Schillinger’s heirs and replaced Schillinger’s horse-drawn moving vans with trucks), and finally progressing into the period of reconstruction and modernization as personified by J. Z. Morris and Jackie Ho and their diverse and changing cast of tenants, which included a travel agent, a freelance photographer, an engraver, an Italian designer of women’s shoes, a Gypsy fortune-telling family, a two-partner law firm, and a procession of restaurant proprietors who never seemed to survive economically at this address for very long. No fewer than nine restaurants had opened and closed at 206 East 63rd since J. Z. Morris had renovated the building. I had patronized every one of them, starting with Le Premier in 1977, and, being sentimental about restaurants and easily pleased as a customer, I was both saddened and bewildered by the frequency of foreclosures.

  As I said earlier, my old friend Nicola Spagnolo, the third restaurateur to try his luck at 206 East 63rd Street, had closed Gnolo in the spring of 1985, following an eight-month history that almost led him into personal bankruptcy. The two-floor restaurant space went unrented for the next fifteen months. In the winter of 1986, however, it was taken over by an optimistic and audacious gourmand named Marvin Safir, a cousin of an acquaintance of mine at the Times, the columnist William Safire, the latter having added an e to his surname because he thought it would encourage the pronunciation he preferred: sah-fire, rather than say-fur. His cousin Marvin was nearly sixty when he opened the fourth restaurant at the Sixty-third Street address, calling it Moon’s because his boyhood nickname had been “Moon.” He had previously owned two small praiseworthy restaurants, one on the West Side, the other further uptown on the East Side, but at this point in his life Marvin Safir wanted a more spacious dining interior so that he might rival the triumphant and trileveled “21” Club on West Fifty-second Street, where, as a onetime patron, he believed he had never received from the proprietors and waiters the deferential treatment known to the man by whom he measured himself: his late father, Leo Safir, a flamboyant ladies’ man and bon vivant who had manufactured men’s robes and been referred to in the garment industry as “the Bathrobe Baron.” Although the decor at Marvin Safir’s Moon’s imitated the “21” Club (dark wood paneling, gleaming brass appointments), and although he had hired a distinguished chef who had cooked in the White House for President Gerald Ford, Moon’s restaurant never managed to draw sufficient numbers of customers to support its high overhead and compete with “21”; it closed after two years, in 1988, having lost more than $2 million. “The restaurant business,” said one of Marvin Safir’s partners, “is an oxymoron.”

  The fifth restaurant to open at 206 East 63rd did so during the holiday season of 1988. It was called John Clancy’s East, and was an uptown affiliate of the critically acclaimed and financially solvent two-story John Clancy’s seafood specialty eatery that had opened downtown in 1981 on West Tenth Street in Greenwich Village. The restaurant’s founder and namesake was an introverted ex-U.S. Marine Corps’ cook during the Korean War named John Clancy, who preferred to work in the kitchen while his extroverted partner, Sam Rubin, stood near the front door, greeting customers and escorting them to tables. Since the two partners looked alike—both were tall, bearded, and balding—and since Clancy continued to distance himself from his clientele while preparing the meals, most customers assumed that the sole owner and namesake of John Clancy’s was Sam Rubin. After John Clancy had gone into semiretirement in 1984, Rubin did become the sole owner, and, having purchased the legal use of the trade name, Rubin used it in 1988 when he expanded uptown with John Clancy’s East at 206 East 63rd Street. Rubin had been persuaded to take over this moribund space that had been Moon’s by a friend and fellow restaurateur named Michael Schwartz, an articulate and personable New Yorker in his fifties, who had been so sanguine about the Sixty-third Street venture that he volunteered to underwrite it and to assist Rubin personally in its operation.

/>   Michael Schwartz had grown up in a family that had long owned and operated restaurants in the Wall Street area, and he took pride in being a shrewd investor in dining properties and an experienced administrator in all aspects of the business. Michael Schwartz’s enterprising grandfather from Austria-Hungary, Sigmund Schwartz, had arrived in New York in the 1880s, and, as a part-time waiter at a restaurant downtown on Chambers Street, Sigmund Schwartz was known to tell his customers complimentary things about another restaurant nearby in which he also worked as a part-time waiter and had a small investment. By 1902, having enlarged upon his investment, Sigmund Schwartz was sufficiently affluent to launch his wholly owned Schwartz restaurant on Church Street. In 1927, his son Henry opened a second Schwartz not far away on Broad Street. In 1967, the grandson Michael Schwartz introduced Michael One on Trinity Street, and in later years had Michael’s on Broadway and Michael’s on John Street.

  But after Michael Schwartz had signed a contract with J. Z. Morris for the sublease of the dining space for John Clancy’s East, Schwartz would prove to be no more adept than Marvin Safir had been in overseeing a profitable enterprise at 206 East 63rd Street. Schwartz and his partner Sam Rubin were equally perplexed by this situation, and so was the New York Times food critic at the time, Bryan Miller, whose 1989 review of the restaurant began: “John Clancy’s, one of the best seafood restaurants in Greenwich Village, recently opened a handsome new branch at 206 East 63rd Street called John Clancy’s East. A recent visit found that the fish have not fared well on their migration upstream. This is puzzling because the chef, Lynn Aronson, used to run the downtown kitchen.…” Defending the chef’s cooking at John Clancy’s East, however, was the veteran critic Mimi Sheraton, who in her popular newsletter referred to the restaurant as “practically what the doctor ordered,” and Sheraton added, “Nowhere will you find a thicker, more delicately woodsy fillet of smoked trout with a fluff of horseradish-flecked whipped cream or larger, firmer shrimp served with horseradish and a puree of sweet red peppers. Dillscented gravlax, the raw salmon marinated to near translucence … equally good are the little necks, steamed in a good-to-the-last-drop tomato fennel broth.” Still, John Clancy’s East was unable to lure enough customers to sustain itself beyond 1991. In dissolving the partnership with Sam Rubin, Michael Schwartz recalled a remark made to him long ago by his late father: “There are no answers in the restaurant business.”

  The sixth restaurant at 206 East 63rd opened in 1992 under the auspices of a vivacious thirty-nine-year-old black woman named Yvonne Bell, who was popularly known as “Lola” Bell, and who specialized in Caribbean cooking. Born in New York City of immigrant parents from Jamaica, and aspiring to a career as a singer and dancer, Lola Bell worked during her teenage years as a waitress in order to support herself between auditions; but since none of her auditions led to professional fulfillment, she continued to work in restaurants, becoming in time a hostess and manager of a place near lower Broadway and the Flatiron Building. Here she cheerfully greeted and seated her customers in a way that made them feel very welcome and wanted, and she also gained distinction by dressing sumptuously, favoring colorful gowns shimmering with sequins, and light-catching rhinestone earrings and bracelets, and she often covered the close-cropped hair on her small head with one of a multiplicity of stagy wigs. She soon attracted crowds of regular customers, one being the celebrated Broadway dancer and director-choreographer Geoffrey Holder, in front of whom she had once auditioned unsuccessfully. “You don’t have to be onstage,” he said, referring to her restaurant job. “This is your stage.”

  In 1985, she attained marquee status in the dining world after acquiring the financial backing to open Lola’s at 30 West 22nd Street. It not only featured her specialties—spicy Caribbean fried chicken, shrimp and chicken curry, honey-glazed ham steak with black-eyed peas and collard greens—but on Sundays she added what she called a “gospel brunch.” Between noon and 3:00 p.m., while her customers were being served, they were serenaded by a standing group of black men and women who were among her churchgoing choir friends. The fact that the singers received favorable notices in newspaper columns brought in additional customers. But along with the commercial success of Lola’s restaurant arose managerial disagreements between Lola Bell and her partners that would remain unresolved, and would lead in 1992 to her departure from Lola’s and her acceptance of financial help from Michael Schwartz (who had been among her Sunday brunch customers) to take over the space vacated by John Clancy’s East at 206 East 63rd Street. She would rename the place Lolabelle.

  She changed the old decor but otherwise infused the dining area with her customary charm and exuberance, her Caribbean culinary specialties, and, on Sundays, her gospel brunch. She also decided to entertain her dinner guests on two or three nights a week with the accompanying sounds of reggae musicians, jazz combos, and vocal soloists. She believed that the possibility of success on Sixty-third Street would be fostered by the presence of live music, and so she alternatively used the second floor and sometimes the first floor as well in featuring Lolabelle as a combination restaurant and supper club. Since she would not be opening the place for lunch on weekdays—none of the five previous restaurants at this address had drawn a large-enough luncheon crowd to offset their midday operating costs—she would be counting on an increased volume of business at night to make a profit after meeting her expenses, which included J. Z. Morris’s monthly rent of $14,000, nearly $3,000 a month for the electricity, $2,000 for the linen, $1,500 for the water, $850 for private cartage, perhaps $30,000 to purchase the food and liquor, plus a weekly total cost of about $10,000 in salaries for the kitchen crew and dining room staff. Still, she started out convinced that Lolabelle would soon triumph as an establishment.

  It would not happen. Her business began promisingly, but then, slowly but steadily, it went into decline through 1993 and into 1994. The crowds that had patronized her at Lola’s downtown did not flock to Lolabelle uptown. The quality of the food uptown was the same as it had been downtown, the prices were the same, the voices of her Sunday gospel singers were the same, but the revenues generated were hardly the same. After a bit more than two years at 206 East 63rd Street, Lolabelle ceased to exist.

  Five months after it closed—Lola Bell had meanwhile signed a televison contract to anchor a food show—a seventh restaurant prepared to make its debut at 206 East 63rd. It was the Napa Valley Grill. It was being financed by a young New York investment banker and food fancier named Michael Toporek, who, having become enamored of northern California during his sojourns in the wine country, sought to transfer some of its ambience and flavor to Sixty-third Street.

  Prior to the restaurant’s opening, Toporek spent extravagantly on interior alterations and renovations. He sent his workmen inside to knock a square hole through one side of the second floor so that the lengthy tropical plants he planned to hang upstairs would dangle below and be visible to the customers seated in the main dining room on the first floor. He furnished both floors with comfortable silk-covered green banquettes and tables covered with fine linen, as well as china decorated with floral engravings. In the rear of the first floor, next to the door leading into the kitchen, he spent $35,000 on the construction of a seven-foot-high circular brick wood-burning oven. On the sidewalk overlooking the entrance-way he replaced the beige canvas marquee labeled LOLABELLE with a sprightly tricolored one that was a blend of yellow, pink, and violet and that spelled out in scripted lettering NAPA VALLEY GRILL.

  In a printed statement that was included with the opening-night menus, Michael Toporek explained, “While traveling through the Napa Valley last year and enjoying the fine food and wine the region has to offer, my wife and I heard an interesting story that helped inspire the concept behind this restaurant. We heard that a well-known movie producer has a vineyard in his backyard where he also has a wood-burning brick oven and an open grill. One of his favorite ways to spend an afternoon is to have his friends over, enjoy great wine from his own viney
ard, great pizza from his wood-burning oven and fine food from his grill. What we hoped to create here is a place where people could relax, feel comfortable, and have fine food and wine with friends, as if they were sitting in our backyard.”

  A large crowd gathered at the Napa Valley Grill to attend the opening-night party on March 21, 1995. During the summer and fall of 1995, however, there were far fewer customers being served. And then on a cold day in late November while I was passing the Napa Valley Grill during a midafternoon stroll—only two days after I had last dined there—I saw the front door padlocked, the dining room vacated, and a FOR RENT sign posted behind the plate-glass window. I was startled to learn about the sudden demise of the Napa Valley Grill, for despite its brief tenure of only eight months, it had largely fulfilled my expectations of what a desirable neighborhood restaurant should be. Its service had been friendly and efficient, its food attractively presented, and its maître d’ used to wink at me knowingly whenever I walked in during uncommonly busy evenings without a reservation, indicating that he would seat me ahead of whoever else was waiting but lacked my status as a recognized regular.

  I immediately tried to contact Michael Toporek at his apartment uptown on York Avenue, hoping to gain his insight into what had gone wrong at the Napa Valley Grill. But he neither returned my calls nor replied to my letters, and I never again caught a glimpse of him walking around in the vicinity of East Sixty-third Street. He was dodging his creditors, I was later told by one of his friends, who went on to say, “As a restaurant owner, Michael made a cardinal mistake—he fell in love with his restaurant. He took five months to fix it up, and spent a fortune fussing over it. Whatever he bought was the best quality, the best workmanship, but when he finally opened up his restaurant, he was too deeply in debt to continue to run it. His creditors were swarming into his place all the time, demanding to be paid for their construction work, their food and beverage deliveries, the delinquent utility bills and other charges.” I also learned, after calling J. Z. Morris in Sarasota, that Michael Toporek was usually in arrears with the monthly rent, and when Toporek would see Jackie Ho coming in to collect it, he would try to elude her by retreating into the kitchen and then descending via the rear staircase into the basement’s wine cellar.