Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976)

by Stadiem, William

  MASTER OF HIS DOMAIN. Claude Terrail, at the top of the gastronomic world at his restaurant, La Tour d’Argent, 1958. (photo credit 6.1)

  While Dugléré died in 1884, the Café Anglais continued to reign until it became a victim of the rise of Maxim’s and closed in 1913. Maxim’s had started in 1893 as an Italian ice cream parlor, but a dramatic art nouveau redo in 1899 made it the hot spot for tourists to the 1900 World’s Fair, for which the Eiffel Tower was built. With its murals of naked nymphs cavorting on the walls and its famed courtesans, such as La Belle Otero, cavorting at the tables and on the dance floor with the crowned heads of Europe, Maxim’s fused elements of the bordello with those of the restaurant. The hybrid was a huge smash and was immortalized as the setting of Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta, The Merry Widow. André Terrail knew he could never take on Maxim’s. No one could. He decided to start fresh and keep his distance, on the Left Bank, buying out a small hotel-restaurant on the Quai de la Tournelle, across from Notre Dame, and stocking it with the vintage bottles of the Café Anglais’s vaunted wine cellar.

  The name, La Tour d’Argent, was far grander than the place. The hotel building was nineteenth-century, recent vintage compared to the mythology of its predecessor namesake, an inn called the Silver Tower founded on the spot in 1562. It served traveling royalty dishes like roasted swan, omelets with rooster testicles, and nineteen preparations of artichokes. The Silver Tower stories may all have been fabrications of André Terrail’s showmanly press kit. The hotel he bought was totally modest, nothing like his George V. But as always, his plans were wildly ambitious. André Terrail closed the hotel part and brought Dugléré’s recipes to the ground-floor restaurant, plus the creation of his father-in-law, Burdel, the bloody duck, prepared tableside with beaucoup de panache, then the brilliant theatrical touch of giving each duck eater a numbered certificate as a treasured souvenir of the whole food show.

  The liveried waiters would play food professors, explaining to the customers how the ducks were raised, in the prime fowl country of Challans, in the French Southwest, and how they were killed, by asphyxiation, so that all the blood would be retained and it could be squeezed out in the press and flambéed with the duck meat to showmanlike succulence. Duck number 328 had been served to the Duke of Windsor, later King Edward VII, at the Café Anglais back in 1890. The first king to get numbered at the Tour was Spain’s Alfonso XIII, number 40,132, in 1914. Little Claude Terrail, who had grown up in family quarters above the restaurant, watched Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York, devour number 112,151 in 1929. Although the dish had been selling in the tens of thousands, a luxury precursor of the hamburger tally McDonald’s would flaunt under its golden arches, the whole duck thing was too much for Claude. He vowed not to follow his father into the hospitality trade. He wanted to become an actor.

  Terrail had been ambivalent about the power of food. His first lesson in this regard had come when, dispatched to a French boarding school at an early age, he was given a huge foie gras by his father to present to his headmaster/priest as a Christmas gift. Nine-year-old Claude was appalled. You gave a priest a Bible or something lasting, he thought, not something to eat. His fears of expulsion were unfounded; the schoolmaster adored the foie gras and gave Claude a big hug of thanks. Still, he was conflicted about killing geese and ducks, less so about playing cowboys and Indians and shooting arrows at the George V doorman from the Terrails’ new apartment next to the hotel.

  Claude’s thespian ambitions came from a teenage crush he developed on actress/singer Jeanette MacDonald, resplendent as the queen of Sylvania in the 1929 talkie smash The Love Parade, opposite Maurice Chevalier. MacDonald, pursued by suitors from two continents, took up residence at the George V, and Claude’s teen fantasy was to join her love parade. Alas, his indignant father prevented Claude from finding out her room number. He shipped his son off across the Channel to an English boarding school for a year, hoping the rain and fog would cool his son’s rising sap. It did not. What the British exile did accomplish was to give Claude a deep appreciation of his father’s kitchen and that of his country. His nickname of “Froggy” bothered him less than his breakfasts of cold porridge and his lunches of boiled haddock and potatoes. The highlight of his stay was when his father, who knew the queen’s French chef, took him to Buckingham Palace to visit the royal kitchen.

  To separate Claude from the malign temptations of his celebrity-filled hotel, André Terrail shipped his son abroad once more. This time the exile was to regal Vienna, to study diplomacy (it was preferable to drama) at the Hapsburg-founded Theresian Academy, where Europe’s future Metternichs were made, if not born. Diplomacy turned out to be perfect training for running a restaurant of massive egos, as the Tour would prove to be. But Claude was unwilling to go back to Paris to apprentice in the Tour d’Argent, as his father wished. He got his first real job, as attaché to the Egyptian ambassador in Bucharest. That, however, was the beginning and end of his diplomatic career. André Terrail had no more patience with his son’s wild oats. He decreed that Claude would be following in his footsteps at the Tour. That was it. Claude was summoned home to Paris.

  Dutiful French son, Claude accepted his destiny. In the midthirties, he began wearing his father’s trademark buttonhole carnation, helping to greet such rich Depression-proof Americans as John D. Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst, and Charlie Chaplin. André’s best American friend was Bobby Lehman of Lehman Brothers, who helped provide the financing that got Juan Trippe’s Pan Am circling the globe. Claude’s first brainstorm was to convert the Tour’s roof into a summer garden and begin serving en plein air. It was the first time that the place had taken advantage of its view, so spectacular that the “duck on the roof” experience was written up in The New York Herald, the first salvo in what would become a perpetual fusillade of great publicity. That a lot of dishes may have gotten cold en route up the six flights from the kitchen to the roof was beside the point. The view was the thing. A new kitchen on the same level would not come until years later.

  In 1939, with war looming, Claude, who had learned to fly, joined the French air force. But the air ministry kept him grounded in a desk job where his main task was getting tables for officers, politicians, and other VIPs at the Tour, which had been duking it out with Maxim’s for nearly three decades as the hardest reservation in the city. That all ended with Paris’s quick capitulation to the Nazis in June 1940. Then stationed in Lyons, Claude got an emergency leave to fly to Paris, where he managed to brick up a false wall in the Tour’s wine cellar behind which he secreted his finest bottles, only hours before one of Göring’s lieutenants came to requisition the whole stock of rare 1868s. The Tour regretted that they had all been consumed, and the Germans, unable to find them, bought the lie.

  The German high command, self-styled gastronomes who had targeted the Tour as a trophy destination, never figured out the ruse. Although the restaurant was about to close because all its staff had traded their servers’ uniforms for military ones, the Germans insisted that it reopen, but only for them, as a sort of officers’ club. Claude obliged them, though insisting that he keep a small public dining room open for his aging French regulars, those too old to have fled the Nazis. This move was not about cuisine but about intelligence. The little room became a nest of spies, one of the best sources of information in Paris about the moves of its despised occupiers. The Tour treated the Germans as tourists of the dumbest stripe. This was the one and only time Claude Terrail admitted to the “Frenchy” tactics—padding bills, disguising spoiled food with heavy sauces, putting the cheapest wine in the most expensive used bottles and recorking them—that he and his fellow hosts were accused of foisting on armies of American visitors in the postwar decades. The suckering of Nazis, he declared proudly, was not a vice but a point of honor.

  Claude Terrail did not confine his wartime exploits to the Tour. His work in liberating Alsace-Lorraine and capturing Hitler’s fortress at Berchtesgaden won him a Croix de Guerre. But
he could never escape his connection to the restaurant. He was tapped to have the Tour cater a “Big Four” victory dinner in Berlin for Allied generals Eisenhower, Montgomery, Koenig, and Zhukov. Given the destruction of everything, the logistical challenges of this movable feast were daunting, but Terrail, flyboy that he was, commandeered some troop transports and used them as flying Fauchons (the Paris gourmet emporium) to bring in the goodies.

  The meal was such a success that Eisenhower, who no one would have guessed was a foodie, became a friend and a lifetime devotee of the Tour. It was during his first meal at the restaurant, in 1951, that he decided to run for president. At the end of the repast, Ike gave the Terrails a toast that proved the general of generals had unexpected wit as well as taste: “Gentlemen, you have given me a fine demonstration of your capabilities and know-how. I hope that I shall never again have the occasion to show you mine.”

  In 1947, André Terrail, then sixty-seven and ailing, formally handed over the restaurant to his son, whose first publicity coup as patron was to win the contract from Air France to cater its first transatlantic Paris–New York service on Lockheed Constellations. The Waldorf Astoria, about to be acquired by Conrad Hilton, secured catering rights for the eastward journey. For his first menu, Terrail served a lot of cold food, foie gras, smoked salmon, jambon de Bayonne, a cheese board, all surrounding the hot entrée of canard à l’orange. It was as close as he could get to his trademark canard au sang. Air France wouldn’t allow the duck press and the flambéing up in the air.

  Up in the air is where Claude took the Tour, moving its main dining room permanently to the roof and glassing it in. He cut a deal with the city of Paris to give him a special light switch that illuminated the gargoyles and flying buttresses of Notre Dame on his command. Every male customer told his significant other that the illumination was arranged specially for her; it became the signature romantic gesture in this capital of romance.

  Terrail’s second great publicity coup was getting to host Prince Phillip and Princess Elizabeth of England on the first night of their Paris honeymoon in 1948. When he lit up Notre Dame for the future queen of England, he was illuminating his restaurant for the whole world to see. Nor did Terrail overlook his kitchen, which had been rated slightly below that of Maxim’s, though the two were considered social equals. Hiring new chefs, he won the Tour its third Michelin star in 1951, establishing it as one of the top ten sites on earth for a food pilgrimage, not to mention the unmatched thrill of seeing stars. The widely held assumption that when the view went up, the food quality went down, was dramatically rebutted. No one could ever now accuse the Tour of being a grande luxe tourist trap. This was serious gastronomy.

  At the same time as the Tour’s postwar renaissance, Maxim’s was beginning to show its age. While being a divine relic was a great part of its appeal, Maxim’s seemed dark and claustrophobic compared to the glittering Tour. The orchestra, the dancing, the bordello ambience all seemed old-fashioned to the new generation of airline travelers. Besides, most of this new generation couldn’t get a table at Maxim’s, which was much smaller than the Tour and had a totally dismissive attitude toward “tourists.”

  The Tour, on the other hand, was always tourist-friendly. Business was business, and Claude Terrail welcomed anyone who dressed properly and could pay his tabs. That warm welcome won the hearts of insecure Americans and made Terrail a rich man. Snobby Maxim’s had its stalwarts, like Onassis and a host of aging royals who refused to live anywhere but in the past. While the food at both places was equally rich and creamy ancien régime cuisine, somehow the Tour seemed both more relaxed and cutting-edge compared to its chief competitor.

  That third Michelin star made a genuine star out of Claude Terrail. He began hanging out with his celebrity clients, particularly the great ladies’ men: Porfirio Rubirosa; Aly Khan; Paul-Louis Weiller, the art-collecting industrialist-philanthropist-sportsman who was the main money that got Air France off the ground (his father backed the Wright Brothers), and who got Terrail the airline’s catering contract; Denniston Slater, the Manhattan aristo-playboy who owned the Fanny Farmer candy colossus; Jorge Guinle, the Brazilian fellow polo player and proprietor of the Copacabana Palace Hotel, the setting for Fred and Ginger’s debut film, Flying Down to Rio; Franz Burda, the Munich-based German press lord; and Bob Taplinger, powerful head of publicity of Warner Bros., who was a one-man clearinghouse for Hollywood starlets and, as such, indispensible to world-class Lotharios.

  Every one of these men was a frequent Igor Cassini column item. Igor himself, as well as brother Oleg, became part of Terrail’s inner circle, in Paris and abroad, especially now that Tour-catered Air France had daily flights to America on which Claude could ride for free. Claude’s very best friend from Hollywood was Orson Welles, who hosted him on his first trip to the coast. His best friend on Wall Street was the Soviet Georgian banker Serge Semenenko, who financed many of the Hollywood studios. Semenenko, who liked taking Claude with him on food tours of France, always traversed Europe in one Cadillac limousine with an empty one following behind. When Claude asked Semenenko why the backup car, the moneyman told him it was there to take Claude back to Paris in case they ever disagreed over what restaurant to go to.

  While the Maxim’s crowd of titled aristocrats may have dismissed Claude as a bourgeois restaurant man, a glorified version of the help, Claude was never offended by their arrogance. He was having too much fun, living higher than any European prince. To entertain his fellow playboys and to lay the groundwork for future conquests, Claude Terrail constructed Paris’s coolest bachelor pad two floors below the Tour’s dining aerie. In addition to the best food and wine in Paris, served by an Italian valet, there was a screening room, a billiards room, a shooting gallery with bulletproof walls, a huge stuffed-toy collection, and two miniature electric grand prix racetracks, one for cars, another for horses, that the otherwise somber J. Paul Getty like to play with for hours on end when he normally would be counting his millions. All of Terrail’s food, fun, and games, to say nothing of his sporty Beau Brummel élan, were catnip not only to Bob Taplinger’s starlets but to the superstars as well.

  On that first trip to the coast with Orson Welles in 1950, Terrail was overwhelmed by the pulchritude but underserved by all the starlets who kissed him good night at ten, saying they had to be fresh for their early-morning calls at the studio. There was only one girl, a shy blonde who said she was content never to be on the big screen, that she was doing fine just modeling, and was happy to stay up all night. Claude seized the situation and did the town with her, taking her to the Chasen’s-Ciro’s-Mocambo circuit and on to Las Vegas.

  It was swell but not serious, and Terrail quickly forgot the girl’s name. Two years later, he was back in L.A. and regretting his forgetfulness. He thanked his lucky stars, and comme le monde est petit, rediscovered her at a party given by his friend, Romanian director Jean Negulesco. Negulesco was surprised that Terrail knew “his future star.” Star? Terrail was confused. He’d assumed she wasn’t interested in all that. Negulesco laughed. This “discovery” of his—and apparently of Claude’s—was on tap to be in the upcoming How to Marry a Millionaire and a lot else. She was Marilyn Monroe.

  And she wasn’t the only one. Terrail had a serious and secret affair with Ava Gardner, secret because of fear of violent retaliation from her estranged husband and his prime star client, Frank Sinatra. It all began one night in Paris, when Ava called the restaurant saying she was famished and wanted to get a table. It was midnight. The kitchen was closed. But a perfect host never can refuse a guest, certainly not a perfectly beautiful, famous guest like Ava Gardner. So he had her come to the Tour, where he thought he could satisfy her with smoked salmon, pâté, great cold stuff like he served on Air France. No dice, Ava said, I want a big, sizzling steak. Terrail’s never-confessed failing was that he had learned everything in life except how to cook. Now he had to try. Gardner pronounced his effort the worst steak she had ever eaten. She went to bed with him an
yhow, and a long, turbulent affair that spanned the globe ensued.

  More risky frisky business ensued with Jayne Mansfield, whom Terrail met at Castel, which reigned with Regine’s as the most exclusive of Paris nightclubs. Terrail had an obvious weakness for Hollywood blondes, and to this end, he pursued Mansfield to the Cannes Film Festival. There he met another violence-prone estranged husband, this one Mickey Hargitay, the strongman and former Mr. Universe who surprised the couple at the Carlton Hotel. He smelled a rat, or at least a ratatouille. And the ex was a serious publicity seeker, far more desperate for a column mention than even press hound Terrail. Frank Sinatra might have gotten his Mafia goons to take care of Terrail; Hargitay would do it himself. He cornered Terrail at the Carlton Bar, asking him to step outside. Taking heed of a lesson learned from Orson Welles, that an American never hits a sitting man, Terrail white-knuckled his barstool until a frustrated Hargitay gave up and left. End of Mansfield affair.

  Aside from actresses, Terrail made a lot of time with heiresses. One of his most passionate flings was with Lorelle Hearst, the Dallas-born starlet and now ex-wife of William Randolph Hearst, Jr., whose prior affair with Igor Cassini got him the Cholly Knickerbocker column. Lorelle, who kept her Hearst column after her divorce from the chief’s son, was a Jet Setter who seemed faster and more ubiquitous than any jet. She had become the best friend of the Duke of Windsor and always seemed to be in Europe, at the right time and at the right events. She was the perfect playmate for Terrail, who enjoyed taking her on hunting trips to his friends’ ancestral castles, which were invariably less grand than Lorelle’s ex-father-in-law’s pile at San Simeon. There, Claude once brokered a rapprochement between old man Hearst and Orson Welles, who had taken his life, if not his name, in vain in Citizen Kane.

  After a lot of close calls, in 1955, Claude Terrail decided to get married, almost as if to please his father, who had just passed away. The highly status-conscious André Terrail would have loved for his son to marry royalty. That he did, though not the Versailles-type royalty André might have had in mind. He married Hollywood royalty, Barbara Warner, the soigné Sarah Lawrence–educated daughter of Jack, who lived in a Tara-style Gone with the Wind mansion that might have impressed the Sun King. At his first dinner chez his future father-in-law, in the stellar company of Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Errol Flynn, Terrail was served a giant grilled T-bone and a baked potato. Attached to the plate was an engraved card that read, “This is Steer Number 123 from my own ranch.” Jack Warner, who had begun his business career soling shoes, had a vaudeville sense of humor and was poking fun at the Tour and its numbered ducks.