by Gay Talese
Some of what I found within my stacks of research had not been placed there with the intention of including it in my book. It was, instead, a private account of my state of mind during the days and months that I had been gathering information, a kind of diary that revealed my personal thoughts and impressions about the people I was interviewing and the places I had been and my ongoing doubts, vacillations, and rationalizations about the work I was trying to do.
“Why in the hell do I remain involved in matters of such dubious interest as the Willy Loman Building and all these retro restaurants on Sixty-third Street?” I asked myself in a memo, and I questioned myself further:
“Has the waywardness of my own life made me compatible with the floundering forces that apparently guide this place?…
“When I started delving into the origins of the building’s ownership was I exploring the possibility, illogically but inexorably, that hidden in the history of Schillinger’s warehouse was evidence of an unfortunate incident or misadventure that might help to explain the legacy of lost causes inherited later by the restaurateurs? And, furthermore, might these revelations point to a theme that underlies my new book?
“Possible title for the book: ‘We Shall Now Praise Unfamous Men.’
“… Get serious.”
In another memo I asked myself some difficult questions and then replied in a way that made me feel better:
“Why am I not writing this book faster? Do I have ‘Writer’s Block’? No, you’re not suffering from ‘Writer’s Block,’ you’re just showing good judgment in not publishing anything at this time. You’re demonstrating concern for readers in not burdening them with bad writing. More writers should be doing what you’re doing—NOT writing. There’s so much bad writing out there, why add to it? The bookshelves of America are lined with the second-rate work of first-rate writers. Many of these writers have a built-in audience and so the editors will publish their stuff. They’ll publish whatever sells. But the writers should be blocked. It would be a good thing for the writers’ reputations, for the publishers’ production costs, and for the reading standards of the general public. There should be a National Book Award given annually to certain writers for NOT WRITING.”
Another memo to myself contained a paragraph that I believed belonged in my restaurant book, if, of course, I ever wrote the book:
“Every day in the dining world there is somewhere a diaspora, a casting out of cooks, and of waiters wearing clip-on bow ties, and of bartenders who will go to their graves knowing the favorite drinks of hundreds of customers—customers who never knew their bartenders’ last names.…” And:
“The midday kisses exchanged between the maître d’s and the ladies who lunch are quintessential manifestations of unfeit affection.…”
And there was another memo with questions that were repetitive of those asked elsewhere in my research files
“Where is the center point of your story? Is it ‘The Building’ that you’re writing about, or the Rise & Fall of the Retro Restaurants situated within the building?
“What is the connection between the building and its occupants other than the fact that Schillinger’s workhorses and Tucci’s kitchen workers occupied a common ground at opposite ends of the twentieth century?
“Why are you, who are supposed to be writing a personal book, devoting your attentions to this faithless piece of real estate at 206 E. 63rd?
“What’s your response to these questions?
“Answer: I think that I cannot directly respond to these questions because the issue has less to do with the building and its occupants than with me and my natural, though at times misguided, affinity for people and places that exist in the shadows and side streets of the city and other overlooked places in which there are untold stories awaiting my discovery and development. Oh, I know this sounds grandiloquent, but considering where I come from, the distant dunes of South Jersey, where instead of reading childhood literature I scanned menus, and where my homelife was happiest when dining with my stylish mother and my relaxed and contented father in mediocre restaurants, is it any wonder that after moving to New York I would find comfort with, and compassion for, some of the city’s unheralded and struggling restaurateurs and would moreover be inclined to become their chronicler? In addition, I must acknowledge something of a personal identity with the building at 206 E. 63rd—it has held its ground, as I have, during decades of urban renewal and changing trends in my neighborhood and, like me, it has so far survived the wrecking ball. The venerable building is unmentioned in the guidebooks of Old New York but at various times throughout the century it has provided shelter and sustenance for hundreds of people from all over the world. It was built by the German-born Frederick Schillinger and later passed into the hands of the Italianate teamster Frank Catalano, whose heirs subsequently leased it to the Anglo-American entrepreneur in Florida, J. Z. Morris, whose ex-wife from Hong Kong, Jackie Ho, presently assists him in the not-always-easy task of collecting the monthly rent from the alternating restaurateurs whose employees have included a bus boy from Bangladesh, a cook from the Dominican Republic, and a waiter from Russia who fled his homeland to make his mark in this building that regularly reinvents itself and in which I must quickly find a worthy story to present to my editor.”
30
HOPING TO SIMPLIFY FOR MY EDITOR WHAT I HAD NOT YET FIGURED out for myself, I began the first draft of my outline with the suggestion that my forthcoming book would be in the genre of a famous novel written a half-century ago and entitled Grand Hotel. I had not read the book, which had been written by a Vienna-born author named Vicki Baum, but I had seen a film version of it recently on television and it seemed to me that there was a similarity between what I was trying to do—recounting the tales of many people who at various times had occupied the old building at 206 E. 63rd—and what the filmmakers had presented on the screen: They had dramatized several stories involving a number of employees and guests who regularly crossed paths within the corridors and suites of the Grand Hotel, which in the novel was situated in Berlin in the years between World War I and World War II.
As I gave more thought to my outline, however, I began to doubt that my editor would be impressed with my seeming lack of originality in mentioning Grand Hotel as a point of comparison. But why, I asked myself, should I even acknowledge Grand Hotel in my outline? It had not been a source of inspiration to me. The idea of recounting a variety of stories from the vantage point of a single place had been on my mind long before I had been made aware of Vicki Baum’s novel, and indeed this approach had probably been used by storytellers in centuries past. Did not Boccaccio in The Decameron relate the stories of a group of people who were gathered together in a country manor near Florence? And, in a different location, wasn’t this narrative structure employed by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales? On the other hand, wasn’t I definitely stretching the point here and deviating from what I was supposed to be doing in my out—lineselling my editor on the idea of what I was doing?
I decided perhaps in the interest of expediency to restrict the scope of my outline to the story about the restaurant business rather than the building, because I knew that my editor cared somewhat about food preparation. (He had recently published a cookbook by David Burke, then the chef of the popular Park Avenue Café, though his primary interests lay elsewhere—five of the books he had published had won Pulitzer Prizes.) My editor had also dined with me once at Tucci and had seemed to share my fascination with the fact that so many of the employees were foreign-born. And so in the outline to Jonathan Segal, my editor at Knopf, I wrote:
Dear Jon:
During our recent dinner at Tucci you’ll recall that I introduced you to a waiter from Moscow, a waitress from Warsaw, a cook from the Dominican Republic, etc., … and now I’d like to write about these and other restaurant workers in a book about new-wave immigrants, successors to the types of people I portrayed in Unto the Sons.… You’ve read all my past work, both in long and short vers
ions—i.e., short works like The Bridge, and long efforts like The Kingdom and the Power—and you know how I develop characters as a way of reflecting a history of a time and place that historians tend to ignore.… And I think that if my next book was set within the milieu of a restaurant, the result would be compelling.…
A few days later I received a letter from Jonathan Segal:
Dear Gay,
I’ve thought long and hard about the restaurant book. I’m sure it would be an interesting book. But I don’t see it selling very many copies. I don’t know what else to say. At your level, we need a book with very large sales potential. I don’t think this is it.
I know you’ve put a lot of time and effort into this, so you won’t be pleased. I’m sorry for that.
Where do we go from here?
Let’s talk.…
Let’s talk about what? I asked myself, distressed with his response. Should I send him a revised proposal, shifting the emphasis away from the restaurant and back to the building? One of my problems in writing about the building was the absence of a lively contemporary figure who could singularly personify the place, who could represent it with enough panache and distinction and individual appeal to satisfy even my minimum needs as a nonfiction writer with a soft heart for secondary characters. As it was, I had been picking my way through the atavistic plaster dust and cobwebs of this building for many years in a vain attempt to discover something more useful than what I already had, which was a stack of photographs of Schillinger with his horses, and Catalano with his trucks, and the tenants’ rental records loaned to me by the building’s largely absentee leaseholder, J. Z. Morris.
I had followed up on Morris’s suggestion that I interview his former wife, Jackie Ho, and even before I had arranged a meeting with her—it took me months to do this, as she regularly professed to being engaged with matters that were more important than whatever I had in mind—I began to ponder the possibility (while striving to uplift my sagging spirits) that she might represent the missing link in my quest for a figure to embody my chosen building. She had been associated with it for nearly twenty years, beginning in 1979, when she began helping J. Z. with the building’s management and the rent-collecting chores. She undoubtedly knew lots of stories about the tenants who presently or in the past had occupied space on the fifth, fourth, and third floors, like the Gypsy fortune-tellers who had been evicted for forgetting to turn off their bathtub’s water, drenching the diners in the restaurant below. Her personal background was also said to be uncommonly eventful, which I learned not only from conversing with J. Z. but with her first husband as well, a cordial fifty-five-year-old gentleman of youthful appearance named Winter Evans, an executive in the knitwear business on Seventh Avenue, with whom I dined a few times at Elaine’s along with his German boyfriend, an international banker.
Evans told me that he had married Jackie Ho during the winter of 1970, after being paid a few thousand dollars to do so by a tycoon in the electronics industry. Evans had initially met the man through a mutual acquaintance in New York, and had Evans not been told in advance that the man was a rich and resourceful mensch who commanded a global enterprise, Evans would never have guessed it. The man was a shy, unprepossessing, slope-shouldered individual in his middle fifties who, when meeting Evans for the first time, limply shook hands and introduced himself quietly as “Mel.” Evans would never know Mel’s last name, nor would he know much about Mel’s private life beyond the fact that he was married, supported a wife and children in the suburbs, and did not wish to alter his family situation even though, as Evans later described it to me, Mel was “gaga” over Jackie Ho.
Evans believed that Mel had met her in 1969 when he was traveling on business in Tokyo. Jackie was then living there as a nineteen-year-old student who had come from Hong Kong to continue her education; but she had become so enamored of her newfound freedom in Tokyo that she never got around to registering for classes. Mel was eager to bring her to New York and set her up in an apartment convenient to his midtown office, and it occurred to him that the simplest way to arrange this, as well as to establish her legal residency, which was what she wanted, was to have her marry an American citizen who was a homosexual—and the individual who came to mind, since he was aware of no other candidate, was Winter Evans.
Evans was then twenty-seven, and, though well educated (he had earned a degree in biology from the University of Wisconsin in 1965, and had later taken postgraduate classes in hotel management at Cornell), he had not yet found a satisfactory career when he came to know Mel in 1970. Evans then held a junior position in a New York public-relations firm owned by an older man who had been his lover for a few months but was becoming difficult to deal with. During the previous year, Evans had served as a bartender at a club in Miami and had also taken a turn modeling bathing suits in Palm Beach. But while financial considerations were certainly a factor in enticing Evans to marry Jackie Ho in 1970—in addition to the bonus from Mel, Evans would live with Jackie in a rent-free apartment—he also discovered after their introduction that she was physically stunning, and he suddenly fancied the notion that she might influence him in ways that would be considered normal by most of his friends and relatives back home in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
During the first year of their marriage, however, he would make love to her on only two or three occasions, he told me. He actually thought that he was beginning to enjoy being in bed with a woman, but Jackie thought differently. “Oh, this isn’t what you want,” she told him one night, convincing him that their marital arrangement would be best served if the two of them restricted their sexual intimacies to other men. And so during the remaining eight years of their marriage, Winter Evans had his boyfriends, and Jackie Ho had hers, going off with whomever she pleased when Mel was not around. Evans had never imagined, until knowing Jackie, that a woman could be so self-directed and determined to do as she pleased. Mel’s money had earned him neither her fidelity nor gratitude, Evans told me; and one day in the apartment after Mel had handed her ten thousand dollars to cover the costs of her forthcoming visit to Hong Kong, she became very upset after she had removed the cash from an envelope and had counted it.
“This is chicken money,” she declared to him, and she quickly proceeded to tear up dozens of hundred-dollar bills and hurl them at Mel, who was seated across from her on a sofa. Mel said nothing at first, but Evans, who was standing nearby, noticed that he was beginning to blush and then the corners of his mouth began to turn upward, forming a tricky, frozen smile. “I think he was actually enjoying this,” Evans told me. “He had this big cigar, and Jackie was throwing money in his face, and he had never seen anything like this before—it was a first for him, seeing all that money torn up. It was like a guy with a lot of money going to Las Vegas and losing ten grand at roulette in an hour, and thinking it was a terrific deal.…
“And yet, not every man gets turned on by the same thing,” Evans conceded, citing as an example Edward VIII’s decision to give up the power and glory of the British throne in 1936 in order to marry a twice-divorced American woman from Baltimore, Wallis Simpson. “He’d been sheltered all his life in that domineering Victorian family, and then he falls for this woman,” Evans remarked, “who maybe had a trick pelvis, but in any case she was an eye-opener for him, and he says to himself, This is real life!, and he suddenly no longer wants to be a king, and he says to his mother, ‘Get my brother to do this, because I’m walking off’… and he walks off to become the Duke of Windsor.…” History is replete with women who turn the heads of rich and powerful men, Evans went on to say, mentioning Pamela Harriman and Jacqueline Onassis, and what he suggested was their Chinese equivalent—Jackie Ho.
“It’s not necessarily a sexual thing that these women have going for them—it’s more of a head thing,” Evans speculated. “These women get into certain men’s heads and make these men crave being around them. In Jackie’s case, it’s the strength of her spirit—she brings to men a kind of backbone; she’
s basically a stern woman. She’s no dominatrix. She’s no tomboy. But there’s something vaguely masculine about her—never mind her beautiful body, her clothes, her hair, all her beautiful jewelry—she is in control, and she gives certain men what they want, which is denial. She never calls men; they’re always calling her—‘Can I see you?’ ‘No, I’m busy,’ ‘What are you doing Saturday?’ ‘I’m out of town.’ ‘Where will you be next Thursday?’ ‘I don’t know yet.’ It goes on and on, a cat-and-mouse game, and certain guys love it. She doesn’t get close to many women. The only woman who played any important role in Jackie’s life was her paternal grandmother in China.…”
I had been told the same thing by Jackie’s second husband, J. Z. Morris: It had been this grandmother who had influenced Jackie’s character and style, her solipsistic nature and tendency to be more pragmatic than romantic. The grandmother was a worldly and well-to-do woman from a distinguished Cantonese family, and after her opium-addicted husband had died prematurely, she moved the family from Canton to Hong Kong in advance of the Communist takeover of the mainland. Jackie’s father grew up in Hong Kong as an underachiever who resisted hard work and hardly ever expressed himself, deferring most often to his mother’s judgment. After he had gotten married and saw his first child, however, he admitted to his wife his irrepressible disappointment. He had wanted a son instead of the daughter who would be born to them in 1950 as Ho Ching Sheung, and would be called “Jackie.” His daughter would resent him throughout her girlhood, and, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, with her grandmother’s financial support and encouragement, she left China for Japan.