Stars in His Eyes

by Martí Gironell

  “Yeah, but it’s a way of maintaining a tradition that will bring goodwill to our winery. In the old days, when the people from Camp de Tarragona invited you to a calçotada, the cava producers from Penedès used to take advantage of it to promote their wines,” Rovira explained. “It’s good business, and they know you’re a somebody in Hollywood . . . Besides, we can’t miss it. The star guest will be Salvador Dalí.”

  Leon remembered a conversation he’d had about Dalí not even a month before—a conversation with Alfred Hitchcock, who was a regular guest at La Scala.

  Hitchcock went to La Scala because he was crazy about their ice creams and their quiche lorraine, but mostly because he was addicted to a cocktail he would later dub the mimosa. It was very sweet, with a base of champagne, sugar, and orange juice. The drink was his weakness, and Jean knew it. As soon as he saw the director come into the restaurant, Jean already had the bartender making one.

  “Thanks, Jean! You’re spoiling me. You know who got me drinking these, right?”

  “No.”

  “Salvador Dalí,” he said.

  “Dalí, the painter?” Leon exclaimed, surprised.

  “Yes! The genius! I’ve been drinking them for more than twenty years now. I had my first one back in 1945, when we settled on our terms and signed a contract to collaborate. We were going to toast with champagne, we had it ready to go, but then Dalí had one of his moments of inspiration. Fifteen minutes later, we were sealing our agreement with mimosas.”

  Hitchcock had gone on to explain to a rapt Jean Leon that Dalí had made the cocktail there in Hitchcock’s office, mixing the champagne they had brought for the occasion with a pitcher of orange juice from the coffee table and a few sugar cubes. To say Hitchcock had taken a liking to it would be an understatement. For twenty years, it was all he had drunk with his meals.

  When they arrived for the calçotada, Rovira and Jean went directly to Masia Bou, an ancient farmhouse that had been converted to a restaurant where the festival would take place. Leon looked at the calçot shoots about to go in the fire. They were long and thin, ideal for grilling. The tables were set with bowls full of romesco, a dipping sauce of hazelnut, almond, roasted garlic, grilled bread, oil, and peppers. Waiters set up grills for the sausage and lamb. Boxes of oranges waited patiently to be called to the stage for dessert. Jaume brought out the cases of Château Leon so the servers could pass out the bottles.

  They were going over the last details when they saw Dalí arrive with his retinue—with the mayor of the town, Romà Galimany, at the head. Jean was surprised to encounter a Dalí not at all like the eccentric personage he had seen on TV. This man was distinguished and elegant, with his unmistakable mustache and its twisted tips.

  Dalí walked slowly, conversing with a girl who accompanied him, holding on to his arm. She looked like an actress: blond, with round cheeks and sassy lips. She stared up with devotion at the genius in his suit jacket and black suede pants. Only one note of color broke the artist’s somber image: a red necktie. His hair was long, combed back, with sideburns that descended to his jawline. Mayor Galimany introduced them and did the honors while they all shook hands. When Dalí heard Leon was the owner of La Scala, he raised his eyebrows and squeezed Leon’s hand even tighter.

  “A pleasure!” he said with a slightly husky voice. “That’s the restaurant of the stars, right? I’ve heard excellent things about it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Dalí. Whenever you’re in Hollywood, you’re invited!”

  “Much obliged!” the painter responded, raising his cane toward the sky. “I’ll keep that in mind, though I don’t often make it to those parts!”

  Jean was surprised by all the bracelets of different shapes and colors that Dalí wore on both wrists. At least six per arm. The hand that wasn’t holding the cane made a reverent gesture to the right so that Leon would look at the tall, slender girl who was leaning slightly on the artist’s forearm.

  “I present to you my muse, my inspiration: Miss Amanda Lear.”

  The girl smiled and stretched out her hand for Leon to kiss it.

  “A pleasure!”

  At that moment, the owner of the farmhouse, Mr. Gatell, came out. He was scrupulously groomed and very elegant, and he held a medal in his hand. His intention was to give it to the artist, conferring on him the status of Calçotaire Major Honorari de Catalunya. In front of all the invitees, Dalí submissively bowed his head to receive it. Of course, he couldn’t show the medallion off during the calçotada, because immediately afterward they put a bib on him to protect his suit when he dipped the onions in their sauce. Bibs were passed out to the other guests as well, and pile after pile of calçots began to emerge from the fire, served on the traditional roofing tiles.

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t try your wine,” Dalí said to Leon. “I don’t have the palate for it. I’m more of a cocktail and vermouth man. I do have my ideas about wine, though. It always seems to me that the person who really knows it doesn’t drink much, but enjoys it, savoring it slowly and penetrating its soft secrets.”

  Speaking of secrets: one that Dalí didn’t often confess to in public, in order to avoid rousing the ire of all the other Catalan restaurant professionals, was his special liking for the restaurant Reno in Barcelona.

  The emblematic white awning that stretched out over the corner of Carrer Tuset and Travessera de Gràcia had been greeting Reno’s select clientele for many years. It didn’t look like it, but beneath the shelter of that white canvas, countless deals had been settled and contracts signed. Afterward, the high rollers would celebrate inside, toasting with wine or champagne.

  Jean had tried exquisite dishes there, extraordinary and original combinations he would later describe to Emilio. His obsessions were the salmon kulebyaka and the poularde Demidoff. He also loved other local restaurants, too, like Via Veneto (for its variety and elegance) and Botafumeiro, with its warm wood interior and silver chargers of fresh seafood, as wide as the waiters were tall. Leon wanted the menu at La Scala to remain unpredictable and intriguing, fusing the styles of those three gastronomic temples.

  One day during his trip, Jean escaped to Reno to order the famous quenelles of sole. The dish was reminiscent of croquettes—little spheres of chopped fish molded with a teaspoon and bound with egg white and cream. At Reno, with its evident French influence, they were to die for. At the end of his meal, Jean couldn’t help himself: he stopped the owner of the restaurant, Antoni Julià, who was walking through the dining room just then.

  “Is everything up to your standards, Jean?” Julià asked with a smile and a touch of concern.

  “Antoni, these quenelles are extraordinary.” He pointed at his plate, where not even a crumb was left.

  “Thanks, Jean, thank you very much. I’ll tell the kitchen you said so.”

  “I’d like to ask you a favor.”

  “You name it. Anything for you!”

  “I want the recipe for this dish. I want to take it back to America and offer it to my guests in Hollywood.”

  “My goodness. Jean, it would be a pleasure, an honor, even, for you to take one of my dishes to Hollywood.” He asked permission to sit down. “But I should tell you a secret.”

  Leon leaned in toward him and sharpened his ears, not wanting to miss a single detail.

  “The best quenelles, like these, aren’t made with sole, even though we tell the guests that. We make them with trout or pike.”

  “We might have a problem, then. I don’t know if pike like this make it all the way down to California!”

  Both restaurateurs broke out laughing.

  Before saying goodbye to the American, Antoni Julià gave him the recipe on a piece of paper, writing it out by hand. Jean was leaving Spain with a treasure that would soon grace his menu. And that menu, the one that would inaugurate the 1970s, would soon feature his own wine.

  By now, Jean Leon was spending more time in Penedès than in Los Angeles. He had adapted to the slow, tranquil rhythm the
country demanded, far from the frenzy and furor of Hollywood. Before, he’d lived among the stars, but now he was passing hour after hour on the ground. He had learned to bend his life to the pulse of the soil, to a different tempo: how to plant, how to care for the vines, how to watch them grow, how to learn from the leaves, to listen to nature. Unrushed.

  But there, too, were factors he couldn’t predict or control. Like the weather. He knew this, but he couldn’t accept it, and every September he agonized over whether they would have a good harvest. All the signs had been right, though, in 1969: after seven years of grafting, planting, trying, and trying again with different grapes—pinot noir, chardonnay, cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon—everything promised they would finally have the wine they were looking for. And now, in 1973, it was ready to drink.

  Jaume Rovira ordered the first cases of the 1969 to be sent to Jean Leon back at La Scala. Rovira had split the vineyards into four parcels and had christened each with a name that had a story behind it—Jean Leon’s story. La Scala Vineyard, for the restaurant that had opened in 1956 and had paved the way to success: eight hectares of cabernet sauvignon. Le Havre Vineyard, in memory of the French port where Jean had set off in 1949 in search of a new life: nineteen hectares of cabernet franc and cabernet sauvignon. There were ten hectares of chardonnay, divided into two parts: Cécile Vineyard, dedicated to his daughter and the apple of his eye, and Vineyard 3055, named for his taxi license number, in memory of the time when he had learned to choose his own destination while driving others to theirs.

  From that well-drained yellowish-brown soil in La Scala Vineyard, cleared of stones, nearly a thousand feet above sea level, came twenty-two barrels of 1969 Jean Leon Cabernet Sauvignon. The pioneer vintage—the best and most inspiring one to date.

  “This is a reserve wine, age-worthy,” Jean explained to Emilio, just as Jaume had told him. “A wine for people who know how to savor the years of waiting, the years the wine has lived through, until the moment when the cork comes out and the glass is filled and brought up to the drinker’s nose, and he takes a long sip, letting the flavor soak in as it goes down his throat.”

  “A reserve wine?” the chef asked him.

  “Reserve means it’s meant to be aged. Not many wines get that kind of treatment. A red like this needs two years in French oak and two years in bottle. After release, you can drink it or cellar it, and it will have a long life in the bottle.”

  Leon knew because Rovira had told him as much. Following the precedent of many great wines of Bordeaux, and increasingly those of California, Leon and Rovira made their wine with 85 percent cabernet sauvignon and 15 percent cabernet franc. They were chasing the same dream: for Jean Leon to achieve fame with a great Spanish wine from Penedès, one that could outshine the wines of Rioja. This meant they would follow the example of Rioja wineries, designating three levels of wine: crianza, reserva, and gran reserva. Each was aged differently, with different occasions in mind. The crianza was easy, accessible, a wine to be drunk every day; the reserva was denser and more dignified, meant to be savored and appreciated; while the gran reserva was the highest expression of what the soil of Penedès could produce.

  They carefully looked after every single detail, even the label, which was sober and elegant. On the top, the name of the wine in red capital letters—Jean Leon—in a dignified, easy-to-read typeface. Underneath, in the center, to attract the eyes, was a drawing of the Château Leon estate. You could see a shapely vine row and, in the back, the house itself. Underneath this image was the name of the grape variety, also in red capital letters: Cabernet Sauvignon. In black were the words Produce of Spain, and then the year in red. The names of the designated growing region of Penedès and the specific subzone, Pla del Panadés, were at the bottom. Rounding off the trademark design were the bottle number and the signature of Jean Leon. This, he felt, was the calling card for his incomparable wine.

  Jean reserved for himself the privilege of opening the first bottle of his wine at La Scala. He was surrounded by members of his team from the kitchen and the dining room, with Emilio Nuñez by his side, standing back to let Jean take center stage. Donna wasn’t there. She hadn’t been told.

  Jean Leon staged the entire ceremony, and after the obligatory toast, he let everyone try it. They drank down several bottles. When it seemed he could leave, he shut himself up in his office alone, taking his glass with him. He hadn’t dared to taste it until this introspective moment arrived. Later he would present his wine to the West Coast gastronomes, with the prestigious Professor Amerine in tow; soon enough, he would be talking about it to the wine journals and sommeliers. There would be time to feed his myth, his ego.

  First, he needed a moment to savor all he had accomplished, allow himself a moment of introspection, of pride. But for some reason, he didn’t feel any. It was as if he had a bottomless pit inside: the more he accomplished, the less content he felt. And since Jean didn’t care to look backward, he couldn’t discern the cause of his dissatisfaction. It never occurred to him that it might be his fault. He’d started out with a vision, but with time, it had grown blurry. He was moving from one project to the next without really knowing why. There was a mystery around his past, his roots, his achievements. So now what?

  Who was he? Jean, the imposter?

  Ceferino, the opportunist?

  Again he had that feeling of being no one, from nowhere.

  The more he saw his family in Catalonia, and the more time he spent in the vineyard, the more he longed to go back there. But from his day-to-day life in mythical Hollywood, Spain looked backward and frightening, and he recalled the claustrophobic feeling that had made him run away the first time.

  What was undeniable was that Jean Leon was so far away from that Ceferino Carrión who was born in Santander and had fled Barcelona that he didn’t even recognize him anymore—if there was still anything left of that kid who got so excited over every new project, every dream, and gave it his all until he had made it come true. That Cefe who had come to America ready to take the world by storm was still there in his willingness to undertake any adventure, in his unflappable will to make his name in the world. And, he had to admit it, in his need to be loved and recognized by the people he admired, the people he had looked to, as if into a mirror, when he had built up his own personality from scratch.

  His thoughts turned to Jean, the new man he had fashioned in the USA with pride and resilience, and then he started to get a glimpse of what he wanted. He’d never confessed it to anyone, but when he thought back over his life, Jean Leon had to admit that on the path to success, he had sacrificed what most people considered the most important things: First of all, his family—not only his immediate family, Donna and the kids, but also those farther away, like his mother and siblings in Barcelona, whom he didn’t speak to for so long. And he had given up those pastimes, like art and music, which had been so important to him when he’d lived in France. He had never thanked those anonymous people who had helped him out in his hardest times and whom he’d forgotten once he was surrounded by stars. He had dedicated himself to getting ahead by hook or by crook. Could he do it now? How? When? Why?

  There had to be something between Ceferino and Jean, some middle point that represented who he truly was . . . That, he said to himself all at once, as though opening his eyes to something he had long set aside, is where I need to look. The center. I need to find the center.

  CHAPTER 15

  Jean had announced the news a few days earlier, over dinner with his family, to everyone’s surprise. The California Restaurant Association had just named Jean president; the sitting president, Mike Romanoff, had decided to give up the post. It was a great honor for Jean to take the baton from one of the most illustrious figures in the world of haute cuisine. A new stage in the consecration of his name—his legend—and one more motive to stay away from day-to-day life at home, to his wife’s dismay.

  “Now that I’m president, we can use this conference coming up as an
excuse to take the family to San Juan.”

  Jean-Georges and Cécile were over the moon. Donna was tired of playing the bad cop, but she also couldn’t stand Jean blithely interrupting the daily routines she struggled to establish at home. But then, she would give in to any of his ideas if it meant the family could spend time together, for her children’s sake if not for her own.

  And as much as she hated to admit it, the best times she’d spent with Jean had been thanks to this kind of proposal from out of the blue. Jean knew that. And Donna knew that he knew it, and that he used that knowledge to his advantage.

  “We’ll have fun. We’ll spend the whole weekend there. All I have to do is go to a couple of meetings, and the rest of the time we can spend together. We’ll go to the beach, visit the city.” Jean looked at his kids, who seemed up for it. “There’s a famous castle there with a fortress. They still have cannons from the pirate ships that attacked the city.”

  It was a beautiful promise . . . but could he keep it?

  San Juan greeted them with a tropical storm, sending down brief but intense bursts of rain. It leveled off quickly, and soon the hot sun was threatening to burn their pale skin, even in the shade. The post-storm heat was stifling.

  The next morning, when Jean went to the first of his meetings, there was not a single cloud in the sky. Their hotel, the Miramar, faced the Atlantic and offered every luxury and comfort, so Donna and the children stayed close by to enjoy playing and relaxing by the pool. They had lunch at the buffet, which featured a wide selection of dishes the Leon family had trouble pronouncing. At dusk, they walked through the old town for ice cream and soft drinks. As soon as they arrived at the restaurant where they had agreed to meet for dinner, a waiter came over with a telephone connected to a very long cord before Donna could even ask for a table.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, there’s a call for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Mrs. Donna Leon, right? Your husband is on the line.”