Insatiable

by Gael Greene

  “Come with us to Harlem for barbecued spareribs,” he said one afternoon.

  “You’re kidding. You are not Cole Porter. I am not Helen Morgan. These are not those bad old good old days when people like us had fun in Harlem.”

  It was 1979, and to be frank, I wasn’t sure how welcome I’d be fried chicken-hopping in Harlem with a duo of aging blond preppies. Two whiter WASPS, I’d never seen. Harlem had not been all that welcoming to white forays since Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of that bus and the civil rights struggle began. Black Power had pretty much drawn a Maginot Line. You could feel the tension in the subway without going all the way to 125th Street.

  But off we went for glorious ribs, transcendent candied sweets . . . and the warmest welcome at Sylvia’s, on Lenox Avenue, just north of 126th Street, a neighborhood both shabby and forlorn, if not forbidding. “Sylvia Queen of Soul Food,” as it said on the menu, was there to greet Harley when we returned one Saturday for breakfast. He had his mind set on luring Sylvia to Bridgemarket. Breakfast was an adventure, a bargain, a lark. The grits were impeccably smooth and full of that nutty hominy flavor. Two eggs with grits and homemade hot biscuits cost only a dollar. We tried the sausage and slab bacon, too, a salmon croquette, and the pork chop, smothered, of course, in gravy goo.

  “Harlem on My Mind” in New York enticed eager downtowners up to Lenox Avenue. And soon Sylvia had expanded into the two stores north of the narrow little counterette. Long ago (before she opened a jazz supper club on the corner and tourists started busing in for gospel breakfasts), Sylvia Woods gave me a plaque commemorating my ode to her sassy ribs, sometimes hot, sometimes hotter. It should have gone to Harley, of course.

  What a sense-reeling joyride life in the seventies was for a restaurant critic. I watched the fever spread as pilgrims from French kitchens arrived and scored or stumbled and retreated while self-taught Americans in love with French cooking dared dramatic diversions. In 1979, I heralded Le Plasir as the debut of the year. A Wall Street analyst named Peter Josten, and Steven Spector, a well-meaning dilettante and dabbler in real estate and art, had created a peach-glow cloister on 969 Lexington Avenue. Each table had its butter in the shape of a small bird, homage to Griggstown Farm, where the partners raised aristocratic quail for the town’s fussy chefs. And there was Claude Baills, late of the Palace, in the kitchen. Good word of mouth filled the house almost at once, but too soon, during a major snowstorm, the temperamental Baills walked out, abandoning his innocent moneymen. The house was fully booked. Veteran restaurant consultant Barbara Kafka realized that the Japanese sous-chef, Masataka Kobayashi, had the skill to carry on but lacked the confidence. She found him a partner overseas.

  What a shock, then, when Le Plasir reemerged and quickly hit its stride. It seemed that the overly modest Masa had the right stuff after all. Everything he did was rare, lightly cooked, barely poached, sparingly seared—tender, bursting with a natural sweetness. “This is the Japanese sensibility of the nouvelle cuisine, splendidly executed,” I wrote in a bit of seventies gibberish. “Happily, the idiom is almost second nature for Masa. It’s in his bones. If the sauces do not always sing, they hum on key.”

  Too soon, the keeper of an inn in the Napa Valley came along, tempting the chef to go west. Masa announced that he would move to California so his children could have a better life. The twice-wounded partners did not have the heart to start over yet again. Le Plasir died. Masa went off to became a San Francisco star. Ironically, given the security he sought, he found violence. His murder in November 1984 has never been solved.

  Thanks to Paul Bocuse and his merry pranksters, professional cooking had new cachet. But unlike the Bocuse born-to-the-whisk band, the new American chefs were former marine biologists, lawyers, engineers. Barry and Susan Wine brought the Quilted Giraffe from New Paltz to a Greek coffee shop on Second Avenue. Karen and Bobby Pritsker came from Boston to open Dodin-Bouffant. Karen and David Waltuck made Chanterelle into a beacon of light on a desolate stretch of SoHo.*

  A year after founding Food & Wine magazine in 1978, Michael and Ariane Batterberry organized a first-year-anniversary gathering of rising stars and celebrated chefs at Tavern on the Green. “It was the first time American chefs cooked on the same footing with European chefs, at a time when the term American chef was still an oxymoron in most people’s minds,” Batterberry recalls. “And all the products were American. The French came expecting to knock people dead with their nouvelle cuisine and there was Alice Waters, doing very similar things. Paul Prudhomme received a standing ovation and he in turn saluted Alice, who, he said, ‘sure beat the pants off those Frenchmen.’” The press that followed seized on the American triumph. Food & Wine, Batterberry believes, was the “visionary magazine in what was becoming a visionary age of food.”

  For a while, it might have seemed I was a hopelessly elitest voice speaking for a manic minority, but now we were hearing from newly-hatched sybarites in Minneapolis, New Orleans, Santa Monica, Berkeley, Chicago, all across the country.

  32

  BLUE SKIES AND CANDY, TOO

  SUMMER—WHEN THE BOOK WORLD USED TO SPACE OUT AND NAP IN lawn chairs—was not prime publishing time. And in that summer of 1976, not much else was coming off the press, so William Morrow thought my first novel, Blue Skies, No Candy, could make a splash. They had bought the long-gestating opus on the basis of the one hundred pages written at the MacDowell Colony after Murray’s goading. It had taken me three more summers to finish my story of the screenwriter Kate, who seemed to have everything a liberated women could want—adoring husband, well-adjusted child, enthusiastic afternoon lovers—and yet it wasn’t enough. Kate’s narrative would begin in bed, I had decided, because that’s where Kate felt most womanly. I wanted even male readers to know what sex could feel like to a woman. So I used all the senses, all the sensory words I used to describe food—the taste and smell of it, the sound and heat. I would put the reader into bed with Kate. It had not occurred to me that not everyone would be comfortable there.

  Certainly there was already a buzz. People who thought they knew the real me from my rants and ravings in New York seemed to be curious to see what a restaurant critic could do in a novel.

  Even so, I never anticipated that devils would be primed to pounce. One week after the official publication date of Blue Skies exposed my brave Kate and her joyful hobby of adultery in the afternoon, the novel was cruelly shredded in Newsweek and by both Anatole Broyard in the daily Times (ironically, he prided himself on being the paper’s self-appointed champion of sensuality) and by an outraged Donald E. Westlake on Sunday. “Kate’s fantasies, or her lovers . . . sound like Krafft-Ebing in a Classic Comics translation,” Broyard wrote. Newsweek’s critic seemed equally offended: “It’s just like all the Nurse Barton books and those crazy career-girl romances you’re crazy about—except it’s really dirty.” “According to this book,” Westlake carped, “not only are women’s sexual fantasies as banal and repetitive as men’s, they are men’s.”

  Three strikes, I was out. I was devastated. Cooler heads than mine might have asked why I was so surprised at the barbed response: all that graphic coupling, the zipless fucks, the wet pussies, and the heroine’s pride in her art of fellatio. No, no, no. I truly thought there was an audience out there ready to discover a woman’s sheer carnal joy. I never took into account that the odds of an unabashed sensualist being assigned to review my book were slim to zero.

  I had been struggling to finish the novel two years earlier, when Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying landed with an explosion of publicity. (I couldn’t call it Skin Flick anymore because someone had published a book called Kinflicks and it wasn’t Blue Skies yet because I couldn’t settle on a name.) Jong’s book made me nervous. Now my book would not be unique. It would be a symptom, a trend, yet another sticky-paged sexy romp by a woman. I wanted to read Jong’s novel, but I was afraid I would be influenced in some way or maybe find myself paralyzed, unable to finish.

  I asked
a publishing friend to read it and tell me whatever I needed to know. “Don’t read it till you finish your book,” he said.

  “Is it too late?” I asked. “Has she written the same book?”

  “Not at all,” he said soothingly. “It’s totally different. I just think you shouldn’t let it distract you.”

  I didn’t believe him for a minute. Oh damn, Erica has written my book, I thought. Later, when I finally read it, I laughed at the similarity—two sets of lovers driving though France, madly coupling. But her lovers had menstrual periods at inopportune moments and got bitten by mosquitoes. Mine melted into molten joy and had multiple orgasms. Of course, Erica had better bloodlines. She was an intellectual and a poet. I was merely an ex-newspaper reporter who had found God in the details of uni sushi and truffled fettuccine.

  Now in the summer of unleashing Blue Skies, smarting from three public spankings, I was devastated. I crept into bed and languished in the dark for three days. Then Murray called from California. It was Murray’s fault. He’d misled me in every way. Since that wild euphoric fling through France, our romance had played out like “Send in the Clowns.” He was free, but I wasn’t. I was free, but he wasn’t. He was free. Oh, forget it. One of us was always up in the air when the other hit the ground. Murray had dared me to stop talking about writing a novel and write it. He had bossily dictated the plot that afternoon on the road between Lyon and Les Baux. And he had line-edited the final edited version three years later. What could he have been thinking?

  “How could you let me publish it?” I cried. “If it’s such stupid Nurse Barton crap, why did you let me publish it?”

  “But it’s not porn,” he said. “Listen to me, sweetie. It’s wonderful. It’s powerful and funny. . . . It’s a woman writing about a woman’s erotic feelings. Don’t you get it? These three critics attacking you are all men. It’s so obvious. They are terrified by a sexual woman. Women will love this book. Talk to your publisher,” he urged. “Get women you know to write their comments. Let them run it as an ad.”

  The ad ran—a tombstone, two long columns the length of the Times daily book page. NOT SINCE HENRY MILLER HAS A BOOK ABOUT SEX CAUSED SUCH A FUROR, the headline read. “The Men Can’t Take It” was printed atop the first column, above the cruelest excerpts from the three male critics. Below that stretched a yard of white space. The other column was captioned “But Women Love It,” followed by positive quotes from a roster of well-known women that ran all the way to the bottom of the page.

  “A super talented writer has taken a completely original voyage into the lushness of women’s sexual longings. I think of Greene as a contemporary Colette,” wrote the novelist Ruth Harris. (Should I have been embarrassed running these quotes? Yes, she was a pal.)

  “. . . Greene has written about sexuality the way she has always written about food—as a necessity of life which can also be sublime,” cookbook writer Paula Wolfert commented. (A longtime friend, too. Well, so what?)

  “If it’s Philip Roth, sex is fine and fun,” Gloria Steinem wrote. “If it’s Gael Greene, its ‘psychopathology.’ Read this book . . . you’ll see these male reviewers are reviewing themselves.” (Gloria would never lie.)

  The ad ran once. That was all the budget allowed. But, in fact, the devastating reviews—echoed by attacks from newspapers all over the country—had boosted Blue Skies onto the New York Times best-seller list. I had fantasized being banned in Boston. That would have been almost fun. I could have rallied the ACLU. These attacks on my writing really hurt, but it was having a positive impact on my bank account. Every few weeks, Morrow would order another printing.

  Though I had never anticipated the furor Blue Skies provoked, I think I realized I could never have published the book if my father had still been alive. As for Mom, well, Saralee was a survivor. The two of us had often conspired to protect Dad from painful realities. But now as I flew home to Detroit on my book tour, I was anxious. All my aunts and cousins and Mother’s canasta pals were lined up at the Bloomfield Hills bookshop to buy my book and get it autographed. Aunt Rynee was already pursing her lips and tut-tutting: “I hear it’s even dirtier than Forever Amber.”

  “What are you going to tell them, Mom,” I asked, “when they say how could you raise a daughter that would write such filth?”

  She smiled and handed me a homemade chocolate chip cookie, from the stash she’d baked to send to my doctor brother in Chicago.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” she said. “I’ll just tell them that’s what you have to do to sell a novel these days.”

  Much later, when she’d read it and I got the courage to ask what she thought, her only comment was, “I’m glad I read it. Now I know other people do those things. The blow . . . you know.” She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “I always thought it was something your father invented just for us.”

  In certain rarefied circles, I had been a food goddess. Now I was a sex queen, I discovered, as I flew from one city to the next to promote the book. My legs were everywhere. Kindly photographers showed me how to cross them for the ultimate legginess. The big black wide-brimmed hat I hide under for publicity photos became famous. There was a pink one with flowers, too. I was as likely to be photographed lying down as not. Bill Boggs interviewed me on his noon TV show, with the two of us lying on a double bed . . . fully dressed and not touching, of course. Interviewers were shocked or amused or outraged. One reporter dismissed me as drab and mousy, dressed like a librarian. Another thought the same slit skirt and ankle straps were a bit sluttish. What questions they asked. Suddenly, I was a sex expert. This was about the time the media was discovering and celebrating (or poking fun at) a source of female pleasure called the G-spot. Many women had always suspected there had to be something going on down there. Certainly my heroine, Kate, knew. Now my opinion on such matters was in demand. Anyway, it was called the G-spot, but not after me.

  Warner Books launched a spectacular publicity campaign for the paperback of Blue Skies, No Candy in the fall of 1978. One of the top women runners in the New York City Marathon crossed the finish line wearing a Blue Skies T-shirt. (No, she wasn’t first. Maybe she stopped to make out along the way.) A giant billboard went up in Hollywood. The cover, the title, and my name winked on and off in colored lights on the screen above the moving headlines on the tower in Times Square.

  I was on the road again, barnstorming for the paperback, when I got a call saying the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had banned my ads and pulled down eight thousand subway cards and three thousand bus posters with a version of the book’s undeniably racy cover: a photograph of a woman’s manicured hand tugging down the zipper on a pair of jeans “obviously worn by a man,” as the Post reported. WCBS was quick to telecast complaints about this moral transgression, and the MTA quickly caved in.

  I was never really comfortable with that cover. When I first saw it, I was so upset that I begged publisher Howard Kaminsky to do something not quite so raunchy.

  “This is a brilliant cover,” he insisted. “I promise you this cover will sell an extra million copies of your book.”

  I dabbed at my tears. “What can I say, Howard?” I replied, surrendering. “You are the expert at publishing.”

  When the first small carton of books arrived, I ripped it open and screamed. No one had shown me the back cover. There was the cloudy blue sky and the jeans again, this time with my portrait emerging from the unzippered fly.

  It was Saturday. I called Kaminsky at home. He was watching a football game. But for a hysterical woman, he pulled himself away and came to the phone.

  “How could you put my face in that crotch?” I cried. “I agree the front cover is brilliant, but I can’t go out on the road to sell a book with my face in the crotch.”

  So Warner Books went back to press with a new back cover immediately, in advance of my road trip. Kaminsky never forgave me, even when the book did go on to sell millions. (I’ll never know if this was my temper tantrum, the arrogance of my darin
g to give him an ultimatum, or my insensitivity in interrupting the football game.) Years later, when I noticed a few of the original paperbacks floating around used-book stores with my face emerging from that crotch, I was told that rather than shred the offending edition, it had been sent overseas to be sold in PXs. (War did not break out that year, so I cannot be blamed.)

  Kaminsky said he was shocked the MTA could be bullied into ripping down the “tastefully provocative” posters that had cost him eight thousand dollars.

  “I’m shocked and disappointed, too,” I said, having been reached in Chicago by the Post. “If the MTA is worried about filth, let them clean up the dirty subway cars.”

  Back in New York, I persuaded WCBS to send a cameraman with me into the subway. “I’ll show you filth,” I said to the camera as I led the way into the scabrous underground. “What about these hemmorhoid ads? And look at that poster with a man pulling down a woman’s slip strap. It’s obscene if it’s a woman unzipping a zipper, but it’s okay if it’s a man undressing a woman.”

  My indignant five minutes ran on WCBS twice that day, at six o’clock and again on the eleven o’clock news. Half a million copies moved out of bookstores in a week. Months later, Ross Wetzsteon took a thoughtful look at Blue Skies in the Village Voice. It was my first, maybe my only, serious review.

  When the book’s respectable ride on the Times best-seller list got me a huge advance on my next novel, Doctor Love, I could easily have afforded that three-bedroom apartment at the Dakota, the one I didn’t buy, as it turned out. I decided I should have a mink, and instead of my initials embroidered into the lining, I asked the furrier to put “Blue Skies, No Candy” in royal blue, with a bright red comma. I might have taken a leave from New York or quit, taken advantage of the momentum, written the new novel quickly instead of taking five summers. But I was afraid. Afraid I might never have another publishing bonanza and I would lose the apartment. Afraid I would dissolve and disappear and editors would stop calling to ask my recipe for grilled eggplant or how to cure marital boredom or what I was reading at the beach that summer. I was a shallow and vulnerable woman.