At home, Victor and I reflected on it. The two books contained a unique treasury of tested, workable, delicious Italian recipes. Pulled together into one volume, Victor suggested, they would form an immensely useful compendium that no one doing Italian cooking would want to be without. I would revise those recipes that I thought could stand clarification; update them, capitalizing on the vastly increased availability of Italian ingredients; and where possible, reduce the amount of fat I used. We would add a broad variety of background information on ingredients and a deeper discussion of fundamental Italian techniques.
There would also be many new recipes, of which I already had a few. When Victor and I lunched alone, I often came up with a different way of doing things. If a dish turned out well, I made notes that I put aside, saying, “I’ll keep this one for the next book.” I am retired, and there are no cookbooks in my future, but even now when I make something different—just today for lunch we had a tasty new pasta sauce of zucchini, caramelized onions, tomato dice, and lemon juice—Victor, who is a tease, will say, “Make a note of it for the next book.”
Knopf wanted to talk to us about a new book of regional Italian recipes. We made an appointment to see Judith, having resolved that we would embark on a new book only if Knopf would first bring out a combined edition of the first two books. Jane Friedman, who was then vice president of marketing at Knopf, I believe, and who is now president of HarperCollins, came to Judith’s office to discuss our proposal. Neither Jane nor Judith gave our idea a warm reception. “What you are suggesting,” they said, “is to take two books off the market and replace them with one. It doesn’t make sense. If the combined sales for two books are low, how are the sales of one book going to be better?” Publishers always know best, of course, but authors often know better. We agreed to do a new book, but it was to be delivered only after they published the revised and augmented version of the first two books as a single volume. Our title for it was Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.
It was apparent from that two-book contract that Knopf didn’t believe in Essentials. Not only was the advance for Essentials so low that it was little short of an insult, but it was leveraged against the earnings of the book that was to follow it. If Judith was aware of all the new material we had put into Essentials, she never gave any sign of it. Without consulting us, she moved ahead with her choice of a jacket, a feeble, frumpy, vapid design whose description of the book made no reference to the new recipes and the fresh introductory material it contained. We rejected it and demanded one that, with elegance and dignity, would have something inviting to say about the contents around which it was wrapped. Another tangible example of the lack of respect that Essentials and its author enjoyed in their publisher’s eyes are the book’s crowded pages, dense with text. They were a surprise to us. The sample pages we had been shown and were asked to sign off on had fewer lines and more white space.
One of an editor’s tasks is to present her new list of books and their jackets to the sales force and ignite its enthusiasm. After the presentation, the salespeople submit the size of the printing they recommend, signaling thus the number of copies that they think they can sell. I do not know how enthusiastically Judith may have introduced Essentials to the sales force or whether the jacket she had to show was still that insignificant first design. What I do know is that, notwithstanding my track record of nearly half a million cookbooks sold in hardcover, notwithstanding that Essentials was the Book-of-the-Month’s Homestyle Club main selection, notwithstanding the potent push from the many pages that Food & Wine magazine was running on the book, the salespeople apparently didn’t think they could sell very much of it. The printing decided on was so pitifully small that within the first ten days of publication there were no copies left in the bookstores. We were getting close to Christmas, so Knopf rushed out another small printing and then another. At Christmas, the stores were out of books. The ad that had been scheduled to run then had to be postponed for several months because the major chains had no copies to sell.
It is fifteen years now since it was published, and Essentials is still selling very well, having established itself, as we had intended, as the basic handbook for Italian cooking. The last time we looked, it was in its eighteenth printing. It is also a very strong seller in its German-language edition, and it has been published in Dutch, Czech, and Portuguese, not to mention British English. Fifteen years later, a panel of prominent publishing figures chosen by the James Beard Foundation selected it as one of the twenty books essential to any kitchen. It was the only Italian book on that list.
The incident that transformed disappointment and irritation into unappeasable rancor, and made it impossible for us to continue to publish with Judith, came later. I had a telephone call from someone at the James Beard Foundation who was on the committee that selected the books for that year’s best-of awards.
“Marcella,” she asked, “don’t you want Essentials to be considered for an award this year?”
“Of course.”
“Well, it hasn’t been submitted yet, and there isn’t much time left.”
“Who does the submitting?”
“Usually it’s the publisher, but the author can submit her own book if the publisher fails to do it.”
I telephoned Judith. “Do you know why Essentials was not submitted for a James Beard Award?”
“Those awards are for new books, Marcella, and I cannot in good conscience submit it as a new book.”
“Don’t you think you should have told me?”
“I am sorry, but I didn’t think there was any point because the book is clearly ineligible.”
I rushed a copy over to the foundation with the necessary documentation. When the awards were announced, Essentials had been chosen as the best Italian cookbook of the year.
To discuss what steps we could take, we met the Leschers, Bob and his wife and partner, Susan, at Montrachet, a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. As we reviewed the history of my relations with Judith Jones, I was so overcome by sadness that, giving no thought to the public place in which I found myself, I no longer controlled my feelings; I wept openly and copiously. It was inconceivable that I should do another book with Knopf. Bob asked that Victor send him a letter specifying the reasons why we wanted him to extricate us from our contract.
Once again, Bob had to negotiate a release from a publisher for us. He had done it skillfully and smoothly almost twenty years earlier, when he had obtained from Harper’s Magazine Press not only our release, but also the rights to the book they had already published. He now had to take that path again, but with internal conflicts that he did not have then. Judith and Evan were his very good friends and he was their agent as well. Nonetheless, putting his relationship with the Joneses at risk, he wrote a letter to Judith that enumerated the slights we had suffered and stated, with clarity and force, the reasons for which it had become necessary to end our contractual obligations. I reread that letter when I started to write this chapter, and I remembered why I had put it away for so many years. It still has the power to roil me. My ties to Knopf were loosed soon thereafter.
Leaving Venice
1993-1999
WHEN KNOPF RELEASED ME from my contract, it was the first time in more than twenty years that I didn’t have an American publisher. I dallied briefly with the notion of retiring from cookbook writing, but there was still at least one more book left in me, a book of the food that had brought so much flavor into our life in Venice. Susan Lescher put out the proposal for bids, and presently I experienced how it felt to become a commodity up for auction. All that was lacking was to have been rolled out on Sotheby’s or Christie’s stage and exhibited like a painting or an antique desk. The bidding was brisk, and finally two competitors were left, Morrow and HarperCollins. The editors, Maria Guarnaschelli for Morrow and Susan Friedland for HarperCollins, came separately to Venice, where we spent a few days at table and at the market becoming acquainted with each other. Eventually, HarperCollins c
ame in with the winning bid. Up to then, it was the largest advance ever paid in America for a cookbook.
The title of the new book was Marcella Cucina. In English, it can be mystifying, but in Italian it means “Marcella Cooks.” What else would I be doing? Susan Friedland devoted herself, beyond her blue-pencil role, to the supervision and production of an elegant and personal book. She chose a designer of great gifts and remarkable sensitivity, Joel Avirom, from New York. We had agreed that it would be my first book fully illustrated with color photographs running through the text. We examined the portfolios of many photographers and even traveled to London to meet one. After nearly twenty years, what I remember best about that trip was a tasty Chinese dinner at a place called Now and Zen. It was a friend of ours in Venice who led us to the photographer we eventually chose, Alison Harris, an American who lived in Paris.
Alison and Joel were an ideal match. They came twice to Venice, each time for two weeks, in the spring and the fall. Alison shot all the photographs in natural light, and except for those of the market, they were all taken in our apartment. Joel was the stylist who designed each shot with understanding for the feeling of the dish and with respect for its ingredients, composing it with inexhaustible wit and variety. The light of Venice became Alison’s genial assistant, pouring such brilliance over Joel’s compositions that each acquired the intense life of a character portrait.
Our apartment and its contents were the props. Nothing appears in the photographs of Marcella Cucina that was not a part of our life in Venice. My notebooks became the endpapers, my implements kitchen sculpture, our doorbell a signpost indicating the entrance to the book. The sun-struck floor of a terrace, lined with forty pounds of ice that Victor had carried from the market, displayed fish for a double-page spread. The parapet of a terrace, with Venetian rooftops in the background, became a pedestal for an arrangement of appetizers. Joel’s roving eye settled on the grape-leaf-and-cluster pattern printed in rust on my apron and transformed it into a graphic device that appears throughout the book. Joel demanded to see everything we owned that could be used as a container or a prop. And everything we owned—platters, dishes, vases, carafes, flatware, baskets, curiosities of every kind—had to come out of our cupboards. For each entire two-week period, every level surface in our apartment, including part of the floor, was populated by objects awaiting Joel’s selection. In other circumstances, it would have been maddening. But we were watching Joel and Alison exercise their considerable talents to make something I had produced look beautiful and true. It was going to be the cookbook that I had long hoped a publisher would do for me. Victor and I were so happy we were giddy.
When I set off on the tour that HarperCollins and their publicist, Lisa Ekus, organized to publicize Marcella Cucina, I was seventy-three years old, and my body was fraying from a long and restless life. I felt as though I had led a few lives too many. Too many sharp changes of course, too many packing and moving days, too many years on my feet, too many road stops, too many performances in too many venues. I nonetheless worked the full schedule that Lisa planned for me, shuttling from coast to coast four times, touching what I was told was every significant book market in the States and in Canada. Jet lag seemed never to subside entirely; there were strings of one-night and two-night stands and very few decent meals at normal hours. What encouraged and spurred me on was the enthusiasm and affection of the crowds that turned out for me at my demonstrations and book signings.
It was at a signing in Pasadena that I had the most heartening encounter of the whole tour. I am completely helpless at spelling correctly any name but an Italian one, and an assistant always handed me a slip of paper with the name I was to inscribe in the book. There was a very long line in Pasadena, and I barely had enough time to raise my head and see whom I was signing the next book for. My assistant handed me a slip of paper that had “Marcella” written on it. Outside of Italy, it is not a common name and I don’t recall ever having inscribed a book with it. I assumed it was a misunderstanding. I looked up to see a young woman with an infant girl in her arms. “Excuse me,” I said, “I would like to sign this book for you, but the slip I have has only my name on it. Could you please write your own name on it?” “But the book is for Marcella,” she said. “Marcella is my little girl. Your books have done so much for my family that when she was born we gave her your name. I hope you don’t mind.” I was tired and I was touched so deeply that I needed to cry, but I held back the tears. I had to keep my eyes clear to sign books for the scores of people still in line behind baby Marcella.
I started the tour in San Francisco in September and, after zigzagging across the country for two months, ended it in Orlando. My ankles had become so swollen that I had to get in a wheelchair to take the VIP tour of Epcot that I had been offered. After Orlando, we took the winter off, repairing to a condo we had bought two years earlier in Longboat Key, on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where we had decided we would eventually retire. I was happy in Venice and content to be in my native country, to speak my native language, to be with the friends of my youth, but I had begun to find it hard to do all the walking and the climbing of bridges that life in Venice requires. I no longer took the students to the market and to the welcome banquet on the first day of the course. Victor had taken my place. We know that people get old but do not expect that it could happen to us. It was happening, however, and we did not want suddenly to find ourselves at the mercy of Italy’s nationalized health care. When an expatriate in Venice asks another expatriate, “Where do you go when you need a good doctor?” the reply is “To the airport.” That is a joke, of course, but the problem is not a joke. We had to make serious plans to live in America again.
We had always kept a place in New York, in Manhattan. The last one was a one-bedroom condominium on a very high floor, in a building across the way from Bloomingdale’s. We considered buying the apartment next door to it, thinking to break through and combine the two. During the same period, our son, who had been working as a chef in Portland, Oregon, went through a career and matrimonial crisis. After a visit to Sarasota, Florida, he decided he’d had enough of Portland weather and of restaurant kitchens, and he left Portland for Sarasota. His wife, instead, decided she’d had enough of marriage. He moved to Florida alone at Christmastime, he was depressed, and we came over from Venice to buy him some presents and cheer him up. We stayed at a hotel on Longboat Key, on the Gulf of Mexico, enjoying the perfect soft, white beach every day and a ravishingly different sunset every evening. The weather that winter was perfect. At the end of January, we returned sun-tanned to Venice.
Victor was at the Rialto market on a February morning, buying fish for our lunch. It was sleeting and cold. He called me from a telephone booth. “Go out on the terrace for a moment and then come right back to the telephone,” he said. “Did you see what kind of weather you have out there? That’s the weather we are going to get if we move to New York. Why do we have to live in New York? Why can’t we live in Longboat Key?” When he tells the story now, he says it is the only suggestion he made in our entire married life with which I agreed instantly. The following year, 1995, we returned to Longboat Key in December and bought an apartment overlooking that soft, white beach, facing the sunsets. We weren’t quite ready to move yet, however. We had people who had been waiting very long to take a class, and we gave ourselves another two years in Venice, until the end of 1998, to accommodate as many of them as we could.
When I felt sufficiently recovered from the book tour, we returned to Venice to prepare for the 1998 spring courses and to find an agency with which to list our apartment. While I was teaching the first of the spring courses, the producer of the Today show telephoned. Matt Lauer was doing a series of shows from surprise destinations abroad. He would be in Venice the following week. Would I be willing to prepare typical Venetian dishes that I could discuss with Matt? Had I been teaching then, I would have said no, but I had a free week and I accepted. NBC set up the taping on the embankment by th
e Ducal Palace, the draftiest place in Venice. It was cold, gray, and wet, precisely the kind of day that we were going to Longboat Key to escape.
Shooting in the rain with Matt Lauer and the Today show
I had prepared several platters of cicheti, the tapas-like specialties of the wine bars, the bacari, so that I could talk to Matt about that peculiarly Venetian institution and its cuisine. I don’t remember how long the actual segment was, no more than eight minutes without a doubt, but I waited for hours outdoors that morning before they were ready to tape. We were wearing yellow slickers, courtesy of NBC, but I was wet and cold through to my core. I cannot say whether it was the book tour that undermined my strength, but my resistance crumbled. The day after the taping of the Today show, I became ill. For the first time in my teaching career, I had to cancel a course, and then another, and then another, canceling every course remaining in my spring semester.
A banker from Milan made an offer for the apartment that we accepted. They were the wrong couple for it, though. The first thing his wife did was ask to come to measure the windows for drapes. Those marvelous windows, saturated with light, filled with images of the city, every luminous square inch of them more precious to us than gemstones, were to be hemmed in by fabric. We requested a closing for no sooner than the following February. We did not want to cancel any of the fall classes, we had to dispose of a houseful of objects and furniture for which we had no room in Florida, and we needed time to pack the remainder. We sold seventeen pieces of period furniture as a single lot to a Venetian antiques dealer. We did not strike a very good bargain, but I doubt that anyone has ever struck a good bargain selling something to a Venetian antiques dealer.
Amarcord Page 25
