It turned out that running a business together emphasized the considerable differences in temperament between Jock and Ardison, and they began disagreeing about everything from the menu to the air-conditioning. Eventually they cut a deal to manage the restaurant on alternate days, and regulars would often make it a point to show up only on Jock’s night, or Ardison’s, depending on where their loyalties resided. The arrangement didn’t last for long. Micaela once told me, “On ‘his’ days, Ardison would not let me in while I waited for the butcher [next door] to prepare my meat for the empanadas I used to make at home for the restaurant. One fine evening, I put on an evening dress, walked into the Studio Grill, and threw a brandy cream pie at him, managing to hit his shoulder. After that I always walked on the other side of the street and never spoke to him again. Shortly after, we moved down the street to open Ports.”
Ports got its name for purely practical reasons. The space had housed a bar called Sports Inn. When the Livingstons took over the lease, in late 1971, Jock climbed up on a ladder (which must have been a sight) and pulled down the “S” and the “Inn”—and Ports was christened. It opened for business in February of the following year.
Micaela was an artist—her painted furniture contained whole cosmos full of characters and signs—and a kind of offbeat beauty, simultaneously earthy and ethereal. She was quick with a devastating mot, and infinitely long-suffering with her difficult husband. She was also a wonderful cook, preparing savory make-ahead specialties (like those empanadas) and desserts that always seemed to take classic preparations just one step beyond the merely good. One of the best of these was a perfect flan improbably flavored with Pernod. The one that made diners swoon, though, was her brandy cream pie. This was Micaela’s exaltation of cheesecake, an appropriately creamy, opulent confection so addictive that some of its fans would probably have licked it straight from Ardison’s shoulder if they’d had the chance.
The day-to-day cooking at Ports fell to Jock, overseeing whichever quiet Mexican he had hired to work the line. Jock was a natural, instinctive cook, the kind of guy you’d want around to whip up something delicious on a beach in Morocco or in a borrowed finca on Ibiza, and he had a bagful of tricks. His borscht, enhanced with an island of sour cream, was just the liquid from big supermarket jars of shredded beets (the beets themselves didn’t interest him, and he’d toss them in the garbage can); the pesto that stuffed the giant mushroom caps was based not on basil but on carrot tops, and he put enough garlic and parmigiano in the mix that I don’t think anyone ever noticed. For years, every main course was accompanied by the same vegetable: crescents of thin-sliced banana squash seasoned with salt, pepper, and paprika and broiled on sheet pans until they cooked through and started to brown. Jock also made a pretty good “char-broiled” steak—seared directly on the high gas flame from his old cast-iron range.
Lois Dwan’s take on Ports was that it was “just a place, battered as it was found, its age softened by books, pictures, and purpose.” Micaela once added another dimension to that description: “It was a forum. We welcomed participation.” The week after I got back from my trip to Bulgaria, Jock let me take over the place to prepare a Bulgarian meal, basically the one I’d had on my first evening outside Sofia: a salad of cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and fresh white cheese; some slightly spongy bread I’d found at an Italian market with a Bulgarian spice mixture I’d brought back; and a pork stew with onions, mushrooms, garlic, and hot peppers.
I wasn’t the only Rome-loving regular at the place, and on another occasion, three of us—one was a writer named Richard Adams (not the Watership Down one); I can’t remember who the other one was—got into a heated discussion about how to best make pasta, and ended up deciding to have a pasta cook-off. Jock and Micaela loved the idea, so an evening was set aside and we each prepared one pasta for the customers. I made spaghetti with an intensely flavorful American-Italian red sauce, but Adams trumped me with pappardelle con la lepre, a Tuscan specialty of broad noodles in hare sauce—though he cheated and used domestic rabbit. Ports even got turned into a sort of theater-in-the-round one night, with a production of Julie Bovasso’s restaurant-set play Schubert’s Last Serenade, produced by my friend Bill Stern and featuring the artist Paul Ruscha (in the role created by a young Robert De Niro in New York) and the actor-stockbroker Michael Schwartz.
The queen of Ports—the woman who defined it most of all, after Micaela—was Ruscha’s longtime girlfriend, Eve Babitz, a prolific, stylishly undisciplined writer and woman-about-town who penned such classics of the era as Eve’s Hollywood, Sex and Rage, and Slow Days, Fast Company, and who knew simply everybody, except, of course, the people she didn’t want to know. Eve had had an affair with Jim Morrison, been photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Museum of Art, and appeared in Five 1965 Girlfriends, a book by the artist Ed Ruscha (Paul’s brother). Besides writing, she designed record album covers for Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and Linda Ronstadt. Igor Stravinksy, a friend of her violinist father, Sol Babitz, was her godfather. Earl McGrath, onetime president of Rolling Stones Records (and now an art gallery owner in New York City), once remarked that “in every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz; it is usually Eve Babitz.”
For a time in 1973, Eve turned out a makeshift publication called Port’s [sic] Echo & Semi-Bimonthly Dispatch. She and I both wrote nonsense for it, as did Jock (under the anagrammatic byline Lion V. Sting), and Eve’s friend Steve Martin published some of his first short humor pieces in the Echo, including “Cruel Shoes” (which became the title story for his first officially published collection) and “Poodles—Great Eating!” which began, “These days it’s hard to look at a poodle without thinking what a great meal he would make.” Martin was already well known, of course, but not yet as much of a star as he is today. We knew where he was going, though. One night, Martin, who had just arrived at Ports with Bernadette Peters, told Eve, “You look like a million dollars”—to which she replied, “Your favorite amount.”
SOME SNAPSHOTS OF EVENINGS at Ports in 1977 and ’78, from my journal:
Party at Ports for Slow Days, Fast Company [Babitz’s second book]. Eve was effusively polite and had made superb burritos, which her mother passed around with her customary unobtrusive grace. Her father, off wherever it is he goes when he’s out in public, was there. Also her sister, Mirandi, in a very sexy, rather outdated Cacherel dress—a gamine working for the UFW. The screenwriter Kit Carson (whose canyon wedding to Karen Black I’d been to a few years earlier), leered rather cheaply and hailed me as a character in the book—which I am, but I won’t tell you which one. Others I can recall: Ronee Blakley (still luminous), Paul Ruscha (of course), the screenwriter and television producer Michael Elias (a sharp dresser these days), Joan Tucker (likewise), Nick Meyer (of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution fame), Ed Begley, Kinky Friedman, Warren Hinckle . . . and quite a few more whose names I don’t quite know. Jock stayed behind the bar most of the time, not looking well. Micaela came in late, nervously, and left on a long errand. . . .
Geraldine and I went to Ports for supper. . . . Jock and Micaela came in late and, after a time, sat with us. There was a new, tall, sun-tanned waiter. What did we think of him? Jock asked. “He’s an 8 x 10 glossy,” said Geraldine. “Yes, but only on one side,” Micaela added. Geraldine later told Micaela, meant as a compliment and taken as one, that she looked like “This year at Marienbad.” . . .
Tuesday dinner with [Anthony] Haden-Guest at Ports. His date was a bizarre woman called D., one of those walking talking characters no writer would dare to invent—a blowsy floozy who looks 40 and claims to be 30, who apparently used to fool around with Tom Jones and Elvis, and who has every possible area of conversational authority firmly held (early poverty, famous friends, acting career, violence done to one, Scotland Yard, diamonds, cities of the world, etc., etc.). A moll, says H-G. Eve put in a brief appearance (when the name of [the photographer] Norman Seeff somehow came up, she commented, “Norman Se
eff is where people go when they first leave home”), and then left abruptly. . . .
M. and I went to hear Michael Ford read at a small bookshop-gallery in Westwood called George Sand. Waiting for the reading to begin, as M. and I browsed, I picked a copy of Italo Svevo’s Further Confessions of Zeno off the shelf. M. said, rather derisively, “Do you really know who that is, or were you just reaching for the most obscure-sounding volume you could find?”—the kind of ignorant remark she comes up with once in a while and which strikes out large portions of her great beauty and charm in my mind. The next night I stopped at Ports for a quick light supper, which grew considerably longer, though no heavier, when Nick Meyer came in alone and asked me to join him. He remarked the coincidence that we had spoken on the phone for the first time in some months that very afternoon and now had run into each other at Ports. . . . I replied that I had been reading recently about a theory of coincidence—of some sort of cosmic concentricity or maybe intersection of patterns which did in fact cause certain occurrences to coincide. I gave as an example a person mentioning an uncommon proper name to someone on, say, a Thursday, and having that same name turn up the next day under (seemingly) totally unrelated circumstances. “You mean like somebody mentioning Italo Svevo one day and then you see a book by him the next?” said Meyer.
I SPENT NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1977, at Ports, having champagne and caviar with Jock and Micaela, then helping them work their way through a number of bottles of 1972 Grivot Clos de Vougeot before going home with a woman named Adele—Micaela insisted on calling her “Adèle H.,” after the Truffaut film—who was a newcomer to Ports and seemed as much at loose ends as I was. Waking up at seven in the morning in a strange bed on the first morning of the new year, I got up, slipped out, and headed home, where I went promptly and very deeply to sleep. I was awakened, in the early afternoon, by my ringing phone. It was a man named Jay Levin, who’d gotten my number from an editor we both knew at Esquire. He’d just taken over as editor at the Los Angeles Free Press, he said, and he wondered if I’d consider coming in once a week as an “editorial consultant” for $100 a day. The previous day, I’d computed that I’d written approximately 125,000 words for pay during 1977, for which I had been paid exactly $17,016.79—just over thirteen cents a word on average. At that point, a steady income of an additional $400 a month sounded pretty good to me, so I said yes.
The Free Press had just been bought by Larry Flynt. This was what I think of as Flynt’s surrealist period: He had recently undergone what turned out to be a brief conversion to evangelical Christianity, in the course of which—it had been widely and incredulously reported—he had gotten down on his knees and prayed with Ruth Carter Stapleton, Jimmy Carter’s evangelist sister. Suddenly, the onetime Dayton sleaze-bar owner and Hustler publisher was hanging out with Dick Gregory and claiming to be on good terms with Tom Hayden and Coretta Scott King. His best friends in Los Angeles, he said, were the novelist Harold Robbins (The Carpetbaggers), the comedian Marty Allen, and the pop poet Rod McKuen. He announced plans to publish “a spiritual magazine” about “lifestyles for the Christian female” with Mrs. Stapleton. And he hired not only Levin, a scrappy New York–born journalist, but also, as publisher of Hustler, Paul Krassner, the counterculture hero and editor of The Realist.
Almost as soon as I reported for duty at the Free Press, Jay asked me if, for extra money, I’d like to interview Flynt and write a profile of him for the paper (this was Flynt’s idea, he said, as a way to introduce himself to L.A.). I didn’t see why not. He intrigued me. I figured that he had his income of $20 million or so a year, his private jet, and his skanky publishing empire, and was looking for something else: credibility, legitimacy, influence? He was, in any case, a great interview, saying things both intentionally and unintentionally funny in his reedy, Ozark-inflected voice. About Magoffin County, Kentucky, where he was born and raised, he cracked that “the major source of income was jury duty”; revealing his plans to publish a pictorial version of the Bible, he told me, “We’re looking for a Jesus in Los Angeles right now.”
When my piece appeared, Flynt flipped out. The problem? Apart from the fact that I had stupidly given him the wrong middle initial, he objected to a sentence reading “Part of the Flynt legend—which he denies—is that . . . with Ruth Stapleton, he went into a trance and spoke in tongues.” He had never denied having spoken in tongues! he raged. In fact, I realized when I looked back at my notes, he hadn’t denied it in so many words; but he had denied going into a trance, and every definition I could find of glossolalia said that it occurred in a state of ecstasy or trance. Flynt dictated to Levin a “retraction” that was to appear on the front page of the next issue of the Free Press, in which he called me “a liar” but added “overall Andrews’ article was magnificent and without a doubt an accurate description of [my] personality and background.” (Flynt was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder.) He also invited me to submit a “rebuttal” to his retraction for the following issue. I penned an eloquent rejoinder, which began “Fuck you, Flynt.” Levin chose, perhaps wisely, not to print it. In early February, Flynt sent me an informal apology, through Jay, for having called me a liar. In late February, a few weeks before he was to be shot outside a Georgia courthouse and partially paralyzed for life, he fired Jay, and my short-lived gig at the Free Press was over.
IN THE EIGHTIES, living in Venice, a thirty- or forty-minute drive west of Ports, I got there only once every month or so. Eve and I did cohost a Halloween party at the restaurant, though, a few nights before the holiday in 1982. It was supposed to be a costume party, but the only people who played along were a suave Columbia Records publicity guy, Charlie Coplen, who arrived in white tie and tails, complete with top hat—he wore the getup as if it had been designed with him in mind—and Ed Begley Jr., who came in a rabbit suit. I remember the party most, though, because one of our guests was John Sweeney, a promising young chef at Ma Maison (I still have his recipe, from a class he taught at Ma Cuisine, for canon d’agneau à la crème d’ail), who came with his girlfriend, Dominique Dunne, the actress and daughter of the writer Dominick Dunne. They seemed as happily together as any other young couple. But two nights after the party, they got into a violent argument and Sweeney choked her hard on her front porch; she died on November 4.
JOCK SUCCUMBED IN 1980, while living apart from Micaela, finally run to ground by his demons (or the cure he sought for them). An actor named Philip Compton joined the restaurant as manager after Jock’s demise, and helped Micaela manage it. The decor and clientele evolved, but the food remained more or less the same. “The menu’s still going to be that same old melting pot,” Compton announced when he came aboard. “Something will probably change somewhere along the line, but I don’t know what or when.” Micaela sold Ports to Compton in 1990, and it closed two years later. In its place there is now a restaurant called Jones Hollywood, which has red-and-white-checked tablecloths and a menu whitewashed onto big mirrors offering pizza, farro salad, and branzino on a cedar plank.
Chapter Eleven
MA MAISON,
West Hollywood (1973–1985)
&
SPAGO,
West Hollywood (1982–2000)
IN THE FALL OF 1973, A YOUNG MAN OF FRENCH and Russian origins named Patrick Terrail opened a casual-chic bistro on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. He called his restaurant Ma Maison, “my house,” and indeed one of the buildings on the property had been a small house, painted pink, before he took it over (the other building was a warehouse for Angeles Carpets). He obviously didn’t have the budget to transform the place too substantially. The interior was nondescript, in a sort of halfhearted rustic French style, with bentwood café chairs and French newspapers threaded through dowels. The patio, in front of the restaurant, was furnished with Ricard café umbrellas and the kind of sturdy white plastic chairs you’d find around the pool at a medium-range motel. The floor was a field of Astroturf. The patio was separated from the walkway leading to the front door
by what looked like one long, transparent shower curtain, and there were plastic ducks in the corner that lit up at night. He had always planned to transform the patio into something more comfortable and attractive, Patrick used to say, but it became such a signature of the place that he ended up leaving it alone.
Patrick had emigrated to the United States in 1959, attended the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, and then worked at several prominent New York City restaurants, including the Four Seasons. A job with Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer brought him to Los Angeles, but when the owner of the company began negotiations to sell Adolph’s to Unilever in 1973, Patrick realized that he’d soon be out of a job and began trying to raise money—the goal was thirty-five thousand dollars—to open a restaurant of his own.
Patrick was descended from an illustrious French restaurant family: His great-grandfather Claudius Burdel ran the famous Café Anglais in Paris from 1856 to 1913. His grandfather André Terrail was chef to Kaiser Wilhelm II and took over another legendary Parisian restaurant, La Tour d’Argent, in 1910. Patrick’s uncle Claude Terrail was running that institution when Patrick opened Ma Maison. Lineage notwithstanding, Ma Maison had no pretensions to haute cuisine. The specialty was brochettes of marinated chicken and beef—trendy Left Bank fare in those days—and there were things like salade niçoise, quiche lorraine, and the Greek egg-and-lemon soup called avgolemono (Patrick had lived in Greece with his mother and stepfather for some years, and spoke Greek). Claude Terrail sent some of his celebrity clientele Patrick’s way, but Ma Maison didn’t exactly set the L.A. restaurant scene on fire. The food frankly wasn’t very good, and there were other French restaurants in town that offered far more agreeable surroundings, among them the nearby Le St. Germain and my old record business haunt, Au Petit Café.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 16
