Insatiable

by Gael Greene

  Even the serving crew was beautiful. Young women from exotic cultures in garments that fit like wet suits. Our waiter, who looked like James Dean and was young enough to say, “James who?” offering club soda after bathing my sleeve in beurre blanc. Everyone was smiling and pretending not to stare.

  So why did Brian look so sad? “This isn’t what I wanted,” he lamented. “I wanted a quiet, mellow, serious restaurant with good food. This is horrifying. Horrifying. I’ll never open another restaurant.” He gazed across the room, spying Ron Darling. “Now that’s impressive.” He smiled and left to greet the Mets ace pitching star.

  And oh yes, Bianca was there.

  The hole in the ozone was growing. Alaska sued Exxon and a few other oil firms for the massive March spill. Hungary allowed sixty thousand East Germans into Austria to seek freedom. “Why They Kill to Get into 150 Wooster” was the news flash from Manhattan.

  All day, the phone lights would flash at the SoHo hot spot. The reservationist would listen to the outpourings of emotion, jotting notes but making no commitments. The struggle to be in the right place before Calvin and Bianca moved seemed a never-ending one. No table would get leased for the evening until Brian McNally came in midafternoon, studied the candidates, and designed the room for the evening. “Look who we didn’t accommodate yesterday because I had to be away at a wedding,” he said, brooding. “Paul Simon. Bret Easton Ellis. Jay McInerney.” Dear me, I thought. Mercury. Apollo. Pan.

  Never mind cops narrowing the street to guard the Italian foreign minister. Never mind financier Al Taubman introducing his daughter to designer Mary McFadden (chalk pale, all in black) beside her new baby cupcake husband. Never mind the scattering of Gwathmeys, filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver, Ian Schrager with his niece and Steve Rubell’s nephew, plus the usual art-world suspects, the assorted Lady Gotrocks. “The evening was lost as far as I was concerned,” McNally told me.

  Friday night. There was art darling Mary Boone, tanned and wearing white. Behind me, I heard Time’s art guru Robert Hughes explaining the house’s barley dish: “It’s halfway between a risotto and a couscous.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Brian was saying into the phone. “Your secretary couldn’t have reserved two weeks ago, because we never book more than three days in advance.” He studied the Saturday-night lineup: Zubin Mehta, Charlie Sheen, Rusty Staub. “Rusty Staub?” he said, startled to see the Mets player among such predictables as actor Griffin Dunne and his fiancée, Carey Lowell. “It says here, ‘the new Bond girl,’ he snorted, “in case I didn’t know.” There were the inevitables of the era: Prince Michael of Greece, art dealer Tony Shafrazi with a party of twenty. McNally granted investor Stephen Swid his requested table for seven. “What shall I do about John Clavini?” he mused. “He’s so nice. He’s just a real nice guy, another one of those you have to resent because he comes with such wonderful girls. Tell him yes,” he instructed the reservationist, then turned to me and said, “Don’t think we just book by whim.”

  Whim, savvy, loyalty, witchcraft, hormones. “Brian’s heaven is a room criss-crossed by dazzling women, long-haired wraiths in clingy bits of cloth, saucy, pouty, buds of ancient civilizations,” I wrote. From afar, or even close-up, you could say Brian McNally had rubbed a few sticks together, scattered a few tiles, planted a palm tree, and for now he had the hottest destination in town. “I caw’t think wot to caw it,” he said in his down-London way. “We’ll name it later.”

  It had been a quiet week—Jewish holidays, a Rolling Stones concert—but the place did fine. There was sudden intake of breath and silence at the entrance of the tabloid’s toy of the moment, onetime Miss American Bess Myerson, six feet in heels. The Times’s Abe Rosenthal, his wife, novelist Shirley Lord, and the Arthur Gelbs (he being Abe’s right hand, they the biographers of Eugene O’Neill) in the power booth on the right looked stunned and rose to a greeting. And then in the late show, A&M Records cofounder Jerry Moss and Jellybean Benitez; Diane Von Furstenberg; a contingent from the hot retailer Barneys; boss Gene Pressman with his house restaurateur, Pino Luongo. Between flicks: Brian De Palma, Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces), Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (Flashdance, Top Gun), the L.A. inseparables, David Geffen, Barry Diller, Sandy Gallin. Michael Douglas, off the plane from Japan, checked in at 150. Everyone’s eyes were blinking as if in a supermarket-induced trance. Heads swiveled out of control. Model Beverly Johnson was just one flash of beauty you might recognize from Vogue. Tom and Meredith Brokaw. Carl Bernstein working the room. The department store zillionaires from San Francisco, Prentis and Denise Hale. Calvin and Kelly with filmmaker Howard Rosenman. A swirl of orange as Bianca was embraced. At our table, we sat tingling and giggling while our butter sauce congealed.

  “That’s Prince Michael of Greece in a booth with five women,” I told my friends, who did not track dynasties that came before Dynasty. “Actually, one of those women is a man.”

  My friend corrected me. “Two of those women are men.”

  Well, of course Brian was wowed. That’s one of his charms. And he could be as starstruck as anyone, making sure I heard about the night he had Robin Williams, Bruce Willis, Paul Simon, and Steve Martin at one station, with Madonna across the room. Or the time Robert De Niro was in the first right-hand booth, Isabella Rossellini at the adjoining post, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver in the left-corner booth, and Claudia Cohen with Ronald Perelman and Carolina Herrera front and center. Or the night there was a communal intake of breath and utter silence . . . for Elizabeth Taylor. And the vroom outside that had the girls squealing, expecting a certain notorious cycling Don Juan, and in walked Malcolm Forbes in a gleaming white motorcycle helmet, unzipping leather to reveal the pinstripes underneath.

  “People used to drink and drug,” pointed out my pal Hal Rubenstein, restaurant critic of the hipper-than-thou Details and editor-to-be of Malcolm Forbes’s ill-fated Egg magazine. “Now they’re sober and sane. Their septums have been fixed. They go to their AA meetings and they want to go out to eat. It’s a slightly different crowd here, older, more sure of themselves. At Canal Bar, they table-hopped. Here, they walk. And we’re all such media junkies. We hate to miss anything.”

  Anthony Haden-Guest, nightlife hipster and my colleague at New York, introduced his date: a born-yesterday beauty with a skimpily bandeaued shelf above an expanse of perfect midriff. “Lisa Gaye stars in Toxic Avenger 2 and Toxic Avenger 3, but that’s not why I brought her here,” he told Brian.

  “It’s about a monster evolved from garbage,” said Lisa, lending me her glasses so I could case the room again. The crowd was giving way to late-late look-alikes. That’s either Nell Campbell’s sister or Anna Wintour’s cousin, we decided, focusing on a red Dutch-bob helmet of hair.

  Haden-Guest was expanding as a British observer on the appeal of 150 Wooster’s unfinished state. “Americans reject perfection. They like things unfinished. All those fancy done-up postmodern restaurants closed because they were too finished. You felt like an extra. Here, you feel you’re part of the action. That’s why people prefer the sketch to the painting.”

  “Do you think that’s why men prefer young girls?” I asked.

  Anthony clutched Lisa Gaye’s hand. “Perhaps. Perhaps.”

  Brian stopped by again. He had the distinct advantage of not being remarkably tall. He didn’t have to lean so far, double over, or crouch as he cruised the room, chatting up friends, poking fun, laughing, deliciously amused, happy. “I just came from a table where everyone was talking Yiddish,” he marveled.

  “You know what they say,” muttered Haden-Guest. “Talk British. Think Yiddish. A Brian place is like an Eagles song,” said Haden-Guest, babbling on. “Brand-new, it sounds like a standard.”

  “You’re so lyrical,” cried Brian. “You should be a writer. You should stop typing and start writing.”

  I returned a week later. Just days from his fortieth birthday, McNally seemed ambivalent, a bit weary, I thought. Though he often gazed around
the brightish (for best visibility) unfinished room and marveled to see every seat taken by someone he knew. “’Tiz sort of amaaaazing. It’s a lot of fawning,” he told me. “Lots of groveling. Lots of pulling on the forelock. I’m buying the time to do nothing one day.”

  Alas, McNally’s backers at Canal Bar took one look at the 150 Wooster revelers and sued him for luring their crowd to SoHo. One day we arrived and found the door padlocked. It was a slam to the excess and the delicious superficiality of the eighties. Given fifteen minutes of fame, 150 Wooster rode the wave for less than five. Brian never had a comeback to equal it. Brother Keith would be the McNally with a genius for the nineties.

  46

  MEMORIES OF MAGUY AND GILBERT LECOZE

  MAGUY LECOZE WAS A SAUCY, FLIRTATIOUS SYLPH IN A FUTURISTIC jumpsuit, with a shiny Dutch bob and thick black bangs drifting into dark-kohled eyes above a turned-up nose, and Cupid’s bow lips so red and perfect, they might have been painted on with enamel. (Years later, after she and her brother Gilbert had captured New York, she confided to a fashion magazine that it took her twenty minutes every day to paint those lips.)

  But this was the first time I saw her, fussing playfully over the Parisian regulars who’d brought me to the original little cubby (yes, cubby) Le Bernardin on the Left Bank in the spring of 1977, a few years after its launch. So she might have been just thirty-two, and Gilbert, the handsome swashbuckler in blue jeans and a fishmonger’s apron, too shy to come out of the kitchen at first, was just thirty-one. He had a thick shock of shiny brown hair, significant sideburns, and mustache below his straight pointed nose, which he would twitch like a truffle dog in the heat of the hunt. For me, it was instant infatuation. I had a crush on them both, and on the stunning simplicity of the seafood, as well. Tiny gray shrimp nesting in a crock, delicate and sweet. Saint Pierre set raw on a plate, then bathed in a coriander-spiked broth before reaching the table opaque and sublime. The baby bar, sautéed in butter with cèpes alongside, was a contrasting punctuation in scent and taste and, ever so subtly, in texture. It was refreshingly more naturelle than nouvelle and free of nouvelle pretension.

  The two of them as children, born eighteen months apart in Port Navalo, Brittany, were often left in their own small cosmos while Papa and Mama worked. Maguy remembers feeding the infant Gilbert, holding him, once dropping him on his head, tormenting herself, convinced that if he died, she would die, too. A reluctant student, Gilbert did not mind at all rising at 5:00 AM to join his grandfather and papa on the fishing boat. As soon as they were old enough, Maguy and Gilbert were drafted for chores, long, exhausting hours scouring, scrubbing, destringling haricots verts at the Hôtel du Rhuys, the small inn and restaurant where the family lived upstairs.

  With their parents focused on survival, Maguy and Gilbert mothered each other. They became inseparable. “Between us there was no space,” Maguy has written. At eighteen, already a local homme fatal in his skintight jeans, Gilbert went off to military duty in Tahiti. And Maguy left for Monaco and then Paris. Liberated from the military, Gilbert joined her there in 1966, picking up odd jobs as a bartender and in a beauty salon, in clubs and discos. She worked in restaurants and hotels. They danced till dawn. “We were happy,” Maguy recalls. “We had the best life.”

  Then at twenty-six, Gilbert seemed driven to find a focus, something of their own. A restaurant seemed to be the only answer. It was all they really knew. They borrowed from everyone to turn a small antiques shop on the Left Bank into Le Bernardin in 1972. The first raves from the Paris critics filled the house. But they were ingenues, over their heads, really, and a couple of scathing notices soon emptied the place. It took three years to find their groove, Gilbert haunting the fish market to learn all he could, Maguy conquering her own shyness. Dancing on the bar in discos surrounded by pals was easy for her, but she always had to steel herself to walk up to a table of strangers in the restaurant. Then one day, the critic from L’Express rhapsodized about the turnaround, and suddenly they were pop stars—she dimpled and flirty in her miniskirts and pointy-toed boots, he with his mod mustache, smoldering good looks, and passion for fish and fun.

  For me, it was a delicious package, a find for New York readers who were discovering in the early seventies the joys of eating their way across France—this adorable brother-and-sister act in an out-of-the-way spot on the quai, and Gilbert’s brilliantly minimalist fricassée of coquillage, the barely cooked salmon with truffles, and his riff on raw fish lightly slicked with olive oil. By 1976, even Michelin had noticed and awarded a star.

  Because Gilbert was untutored and raw, with no exposure to great kitchens, he had no choice but simplicity, Maguy has written. The idea of raw fish, she says, came from Uncle Corentin, at sea off Brittany, who would take a fresh-caught cod, skin it, and eat it on bread. It was her own obsession for raw tuna that inspired Gilbert’s tuna carpaccio, she suggests. Of course the restaurateur brothers Jean and Paul Minchelli, lauded by the gourmand cognoscenti for their bravado, had been astonishing us at Le Duc with the exquisite raw coquillage, minimally poached langoustines, and oil-slicked raw fish I’d first tasted in 1973. And Maguy’s special friendship with Jean must have given inspiration, and certainly sources, to the novices from Brittany.

  But that’s a small historical hiccup. The telling fact, after all, is that ten years after I’d first been so taken with the purity of his food, Gilbert LeCoze’s carpaccios and tartares and smoked salmon rillettes and his daringly just-cooked halibut and rosy salmon with mint at Le Bernardin in New York would forever change the way Americans cooked and ate fish.

  Maguy and Gilbert had moved in 1981 to a bigger space on rue Troyon near l’Etoile (where Guy Savoy is now) by the time I returned. Gilbert was infinitely less shy and cooking more confidently than ever. How lucky I was that our publisher, Clay Felker, keeper of the money bags at New York, understood that what I ate in France was a predictor of what we’d all be eating very soon in New York. The yearly swing through France was still essential, crucial research.

  Now at dinner in the Brittany sky blue nook off the Champs Elysées, I was that writer who had followed the LeCoze star for New York’s impressionable readers, the properly smitten Pied Piper whose lyrical waxings had prompted a flow of impressionable mouths from America. Small saucers of new dishes I must taste punctuated the meal. Gilbert urged me to join him after the kitchen closed that night at Castel, the late-night restaurant and disco hangout for chefs and food-world habitués, Gilbert’s usual haunt, where he smoked relentlessly and downed cognac after cognac. And we danced—disco but tight—rubbing into each other, provocative vertical seduction. I remember his lean, muscled body in the skintight polyester print shirt, one button opened, then two, then three, the hair on his chest slightly damp. Suddenly, we were in a taxi, kissing, caressing, zipping, unzipping. The same hand that so nimbly filleted a monkfish undid my bra with a single snap. I hugged myself together to get through the lobby of my hotel.

  Inside my room, I had time only to drop my handbag on a chair. He was kissing me, tugging at my clothes, the room so dark that my filmy black underwear was barely perceptible against white skin, the bikini panties a puddle of lace around one ankle. He backed me against the door and fucked me standing up. I sank to the floor. We lay there kissing on a pile of pillows and covers he’d pulled from the bed. I stood up and opened the curtains a few inches so I could look at him in the light from the street and the sky . . . enough light to see that face, that wonderful profile.

  We got into bed and shared a slow, romantic, movingly connected making of love. “I need to sleep a little,” he said in French. He had me set my alarm for 4:00 AM. I was deep in sleep when it woke us. He pulled me close and kissed me, and just when it seemed like we might be leaping off a cliff again, he jumped out of bed. “I can’t be late for the market,” he said.

  Gilbert was a wonderful lover. He loved to kiss. Endless wonderful kisses, sexy, teasing, demanding, romantic. When I was with him, he made me feel no other wom
an existed. He loved skin and breasts and everything two people could do in bed (at least everything that I knew about). He loved women. At the time, I don’t think I imagined the intensity of that lust. I never let myself become jealous at rumors of his womanizing because I never thought of Gilbert as a serious man in my life. He was younger, of course, and clearly needed to run free. (I can hear my beloved therapist say, “You never took him seriously, so of course he didn’t take you seriously.”)

  In most of the years when we were opportunistic lovers, I had one or two difficult men in my life back home—funny how I managed so often to fall for men who loved women with such passion that they found it impossible to settle for just one. Anyway, Gilbert was in Paris and our times together were clearly all about heat and lust. Heat, lust, and dancing, my favorite after-dinner pastimes, my only drugs.

  At one point, I was forced to acknowledge Gilbert had a steady woman. She would arrive at the restaurant on rue Troyon in the evening and wait for him. And I liked her, too. She worked in a lingerie shop. I remember Maguy taking me there to pick out a shocking pink satin garter belt edged in black lace, a birthday gift from her and Gilbert. (My rigid policy of returning all gifts from food-industry friends or acquaintances did not, in my mind, include lovers.) Gilbert and his woman did not live together. I don’t think Maguy or Gilbert ever actually lived with any of their lovers, at least not in France.

  It seemed to me they were too attached to each other and devoted to the restaurant to accommodate the intimacy and demands of living with anyone else. We, their fans and friends, knew this. And Maguy has described that closeness: two French halves of a whole that made a life together. “Gilbert was the most important person in my life, and I in his. We had a bond that was blood . . . and more than blood.”

  I mused on the possibility that they were lovers, too, incest being the last taboo in the emancipating seventies. The thought was thrilling. And from the way Maguy embraced me each time we met, rubbing and wiggling against me breasts to breasts, I wondered if one day we might be a threesome. We Americans can be so literal. The French are more artful, sensual, and such flirts. Maguy was clearly shocked when I finally spoke of it. Her hug was just a hug, not an invitation.