by Ruth Reichl
The train came roaring into the station with a metallic squeal of wheels, and I enjoyed her discomfort as she edged nervously back on the platform. Boarding the train, she pulled her shoulders in, making her body as compact as possible. “I don’t take the subway much,” she said, as if admitting something I didn’t know. Lowering herself into the seat next to mine, she sat ramrod straight, assiduously avoiding body contact. “The first time Steven took me out on a date we took the subway,” she confided. If this was an attempt to minimize the difference between us, it definitely did not work. “My father,” she added disingenuously, “was absolutely appalled.”
I thought it was time to change the subject. “Tell me about this lunch,” I said.
She relaxed as we entered more comfortable territory. “Beauty is central to our business plan, and Estée Lauder is an important client. All I want you to do is remind Mr. Lauder how powerful you were as the restaurant critic of The New York Times. I’ll do the rest.”
She exited the train with obvious relief, but as we walked into the restaurant I noticed her glance at her watch. “Mr. Lauder just arrived,” the maître d’ assured us, leading us to a table occupied by an elegant older man with papery skin. He half-rose to greet us, offering a steely smile. Beautifully dressed, he wore his wealth proudly, and I thought, briefly, how different he was from Si.
There were polite preliminaries and then Gina looked pointedly in my direction. “What should we order?” Taking my cue, I tried to recall which of the dishes was most esoteric.
“Cold lamb’s quarters soup,” I said, thinking how pleasant it was to be in a fancy restaurant and not have to take notes. “Nobody else is doing anything remotely like it.”
“Lamb’s quarters?” Lauder looked intrigued.
“The world’s most delicious weed. Jean-Georges is working with a forager who brings him wild greens. This one is like spinach with a college education: bright green, slightly spicy, very intense. He serves it with a little hash of hazelnuts and crab to coax out all the flavors: First you taste the forest and then the sea.”
Gina nodded, silently applauding my little show.
“But I can never resist Jean-Georges’s foie gras; he poaches it in sweet wine until the texture is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. So fragile, like eating clouds.”
“Ah,” he said, remembering. “You gave the restaurant four stars, didn’t you?”
Gina looked pleased.
The food was as fine as I’d remembered, and I ate dreamily, savoring the sweetbreads with their hints of ginger and rumors of mango. Gina, I noticed, was pushing her food around the plate, merely pretending to eat. I noted that food was not her friend; she seemed relieved when she could finally put down her fork and swing into her pitch, rhapsodizing about the upscale lifestyle publication we represented, the one whose five million readers routinely dressed up to go out for lunches just like this. What better place for the Lauders to advertise their lipstick, their perfume, their mascara? I was impressed.
At the end of the meal, after a deep-crimson tartare of cherries and an apricot tart, the waiter appeared with a cart laden with more sweets. We selected ornate chocolates and colorful cookies, and then the waiter removed the top from a delicate glass canister and pulled out long ropes of homemade marshmallow. As he cut them apart with silver scissors, Gina moved in to deliver the coup de grâce. “Do you know,” she asked, looking earnestly across the table, “why Cartier and Tiffany advertise in Gourmet?”
Mesmerized, I shook my head, rapt as the client.
“Because fine restaurants are the only places for which Americans still dress up. Where else are women going to wear their makeup and jewels? Restaurants aren’t like movies and the theater—they don’t take place in the dark. Every time we go out to eat, we are the star of our own show, and we want to look our best. You have to advertise in Gourmet!”
“I think that went well,” she said as we exited through the restaurant’s gold-and-glass doors. The errant limo had caught up, and we climbed into the backseat. “I have a feeling you and I are going to be a great team. We’ve been in a battle in the marketplace, and your time and commitment to getting our message out to the ad community is going to mean so much.”
She’s still selling, I thought, she can’t help herself. Only now I’ve become the client.
“There are so many sales calls I want to take you on!” As the pitch continued, alarm bells exploded in my head. The lunch hadn’t been horrible, but in my twenty years at newspapers I’d never met a single advertiser. Even as editor of the Los Angeles Times food section, which brought in thirty-five million dollars a year, I had never been asked to sit down with an advertiser. I’d expected magazines to respect the same strict firewall between advertising and editorial. Indeed, Truman had made it sound as if the magazine’s business was not my problem. Was spending time with advertisers really part of my job?
As soon as we got back to the office, I went stomping upstairs and, eschewing introductory small talk, blurted out, “Do I have to go out on sales calls?”
Truman looked up from his desk. “Every publisher appreciates the chance to take his editor along.” He is never, I thought, at a loss for an answer.
“You’re being evasive.” I was too upset to be tactful. “Just answer the question: Is it part of my job?”
“Well,” he admitted, “when I was an editor I hated it. So I did it so badly that my publishers stopped taking me.”
“Thanks!” I left his office with a happy heart; he’d told me exactly what I wanted to hear.
Truman’s words stayed with me the entire time I was at Gourmet, but as the years went on I began to see them very differently. At first I thought of them in a wistful way, hating myself for not being more Truman-like. But I just didn’t have it in me. Was it because I’m a woman, trained to be a good girl and play by the rules?
Truman had related that tale with a kind of glee. Why wouldn’t he? He’d figured out how to manipulate the system. And so, although I behaved with the grudging grace of a bratty teenager, each time Gina called, I went.
But in later years, when I was throwing myself wholeheartedly into the chase for advertising dollars, I wished I’d followed Truman’s example when I still had the chance. And at the end, when my primary job had become the endless quest for the money that might save the magazine, I looked back at those words with incredulity: They were proof positive of how enormously our entire world had shifted.
“STEVE FLORIO WANTS TO SEE you.” Robin telegraphed alarm at this call from the CEO. “Right away.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you always know!”
She shook her head. “Not this time.”
Could it be Gina? Had she asked the chief executive officer to have a word about the travel editor? I could find no other explanation for this command appearance.
“His secretary”—Robin was whispering now, as if this was a dark secret—“told me he was furious when Truman hired you without consulting him. He doesn’t like it when decisions are made behind his back.”
“But he was recuperating from a heart attack! Besides, why would he care? He’s Gina’s boss, not mine.”
“Try telling him that.” She made a sour face. “As far as he’s concerned, he’s the boss of everyone. And you better not keep him waiting.”
Robin stood up; if her cubicle had contained a door, she would have been holding it open. Casting an eye across my outfit, she produced a little frown. “You do know you have to use up your entire clothing allowance before the end of every year?”
This did not exactly lend me confidence.
I was still trying to acclimate to the opulence of my new office at 4 Times Square. Even larger than it had looked on paper, the airy, open space stretched up Broadway for much of the block between 42nd and 43rd Stre
et. The honey-colored table gleamed, the carpet was thick and soft, the chairs were comfortably upholstered. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked down at the tourists scurrying across Times Square, making me feel like a princess in a tower. Compared to Florio’s, however, mine was a hovel. I found him ensconced in an enormous leather chair, his expressive face framed by a view stretching across Manhattan to the Hudson River and New Jersey beyond. Both the office and the man radiated confidence and money, and as the scent of expensive aftershave wafted toward me, I had a quick vision of the roly-poly banker on the get-out-of-jail-free card in Monopoly.
“I’m sorry we haven’t had a chance to talk before.” His face was tan, his cuff links gold, his shave so smooth around the big mustache I would have bet a barber showed up daily. “You know, you’re very fortunate to have Gina as your publisher.”
So that was why I was here.
“You know she’s in the family?”
I nodded, silently beginning to sweat.
“Did she tell you they gather for family dinner every Sunday?”
Where was this going? “She did tell me that.” In a rare moment of candor, Gina had groused about the Newhouse New Yorker ritual. Advance copies of the magazine were delivered on Sunday morning, and to her disgust you had to arrive at dinner prepared to discuss every detail. The meal, as she described it, sounded like the exam from hell.
“The man’s impossible!” Steve boomed. I jumped, startled. “Calls me at all hours of the day and night. There I was, in the hospital, barely alive, tubes everywhere, and he’s calling to discuss ad pages….”
For the next fifteen minutes Florio regaled me with tales of life with Si, growing more loquacious by the minute. “You know that Roy Cohn was his closest friend?” I shook my head, unable to imagine Si hobnobbing with America’s fiercest red-baiter. “Roy, of course, was a closeted homosexual.”
Florio let that hang in the air as he moved on to Si’s children (“He’s so mean to them”), and his elegant wife, Victoria (“Did you know her first husband was a count?”).
I kept waiting for him to get to the point, tell me my job was in jeopardy unless I began kowtowing to my publisher. Instead, he complimented me on my clothing (“You look just like a little China doll”) and asked about my office (“I must come see what you’ve done with it!”).
Overwhelmed by his oratory, I let the words pour over me. I’d never met anyone remotely like this large, loud man, and I didn’t understand why I found him so appealing. He was launching into Victoria’s fervent dedication to the Catholic faith (“So why did she marry a Jew?”) when his words came screeching to a halt. I turned, seeking the reason, to find Truman striding toward us. Refusing a chair, he stationed himself at the window, just behind Florio.
Florio smoothly switched gears and began talking about food. “I am an extremely talented cook!” he announced, bursting into an epic recitation of a recent visit to a three-star Napa Valley restaurant. “Here’s this fabulous place run by a world-famous chef, and the guy doesn’t know the first thing about making Bolognese! So”—he demonstrated—“I rolled up my sleeves and showed him how to do it.”
“Really?” He was a fabulous raconteur; I could almost smell the pork, the milk, the slowly caramelizing tomatoes.
“Yes!” Florio nodded his head vigorously, smiling with unabashed delight as he savored his own brilliance. Behind him, Truman was vigorously shaking his head in the opposite direction. I watched this pantomime, amazed. I stifled the urge to laugh: Steve remained utterly oblivious.
“Not one word of that was true!” Truman said as he walked me down the long corporate hall to the elevator. Florio, in person, had been so completely convincing that I’d forgotten the Fortune magazine reporter who had caught him brazenly lying about everything from the company’s numbers (wildly exaggerated) to his military record (nonexistent). Still, I gaped at Truman, shocked by his candor.
“Steve is the world’s biggest liar.” He said it with vehemence. I can’t imagine much love was lost on the other side either: It is impossible to imagine two characters with less in common.
I turned, looking back down the corridor. Right in the corner, where it veered left, was Si’s office. It was flanked by Florio’s on the right, Truman’s on the left, a little Bermuda Triangle of animosity. I wondered what had compelled Si to set himself squarely in the middle of an editorial director and chief executive officer who didn’t get along. He was famous for the long hours he spent at the office, so he must enjoy it. But what did he get out of this ongoing acrimony?
“I’m assuming Steve called you up here,” Truman was saying. “Why? What did he want?”
I punched the elevator button. “I don’t have the faintest idea. All he did was talk.”
“That,” he said emphatically, “is one thing he’s very good at.”
* * *
—
“WHAT DID HE want?” Laurie asked the minute I returned.
I repeated what I’d told Truman. “It was bizarre.” I described how Truman had stood behind Florio’s chair, shaking his head over the lies. “I don’t think those two men have a single thing in common. Steve’s a big, brash swaggerer who enjoys spending money. I think he’s so accustomed to lying he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Meanwhile, Truman’s so self-contained….He told me he spends a month every year at a silent retreat in some Buddhist monastery. I can’t understand why Si would want to spend most of his waking hours with two men who can’t stand each other.”
“Some people are fueled by conflict,” she said matter-of-factly. “But it’s lucky for us that he can tolerate such different personalities. It’s kind of amazing the way he doesn’t interfere, just sets everything in play and watches what happens. Do you think anyone else would hand you a magazine and let you do what you want with it?”
Laurie had a point. Truman offered suggestions and Si occasionally questioned a cover, but neither had ever demanded that we make a change.
“I suppose,” I said, “he believes in letting people make their own mistakes.”
“Yeah. And when they make too many he gets rid of them. Don’t forget that. You’ve never been very good at managing up, but this time you should cultivate a few friends in high places.”
“Florio invited me to lunch at the Four Seasons.”
“You have to go!”
To be honest, I was looking forward to it. I could not understand how I could like such a corporate creature, but for some reason I’d found Florio extremely endearing.
* * *
—
WALKING INTO THE Four Seasons, I couldn’t help thinking of my mother. For months before the restaurant opened in 1959, Mom pounced on every single word written about the luxurious new establishment. “It’s called the Four Seasons because it’s going to change with each season,” she informed Dad and me. “Not just the menu, but the entire décor will be redone every three months!” She regaled us with breathless descriptions of the interior, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, describing in minute detail the dramatic Richard Lippold sculpture hanging above the bar. “It’s supposed to look like bronze icicles,” she said. But what intrigued her most was the famous Picasso curtain.
“Think of it like a museum,” she said the first time we went, leading us into the bar as if we were entering the Promised Land. I couldn’t help noticing that inside this luxe landscape, Mom became a different person; she even seemed to breathe more happily in here.
While Mom and Dad nibbled nuts and nursed martinis, I enjoyed the city’s most expensive glass of orange juice. But a single drink, no matter how slowly you sip, can last only so long. Mom sighed when Dad asked for the check, looking wistfully around: She longed to stay for dinner.
Still, the restaurant’s spell stayed with Mom as we dined on fifty-cent sausages down the street at Zum Zum. Grateful for her continued happiness, Dad p
icked up her hand, wiped away a spot of mustard, and kissed it. “Someday,” he promised, “I’ll take you to dinner at the Four Seasons.”
Sadly, he never did. Now, entering a room that still radiated power, I tried seeing it through my mother’s eyes. It was not, I realized, a dining room: It was a kind of living theater.
I surveyed the captains of industry seated with such easy arrogance at their capacious tables: None of them had come to eat. They were here because they could be seen but never overheard. They were here because the light in the room made everyone look better. They were here to bask in the obsequious sarcasm of the owner, Julian Niccolini, an elegantly attired Tuscan with saturnine good looks, who made sure that meals for these extremely busy people never lasted too long. They were here because no annoying check was ever presented; when lunch was over they simply strolled off. (How Mom would have loved that little detail!) They were here, ultimately, because everybody else in their world was here too.
But Steve Florio was different. He was also here to eat.
“Have you experienced the Florio potato?” he asked as Julian led us to a prominent banquette in the center of the room.
Julian answered for me. “She has not.”
“Then,” said Florio regally, “we’ll have two.”
A few minutes later a pair of giant baked potatoes made their way across the vast dining room, each one modestly perched upon a plate, emitting little puffs of steam. As they got closer I could see that each had been slit open and paved, from one tip of its brown top to the other, with a wide, glistening swath of beluga caviar.
“Dig in,” said Steve, sticking his fork into the middle of his spud. “They make these just for me.” He glanced around the room to see if anyone was watching and noted, with some satisfaction, that he had captured the attention of the former mayor, seated at the next banquette. As his mouth closed over a mound of fish roe, he actually smacked his lips. “Fantastic!” he cried, a little too loudly. Philip Johnson, seated on the other side of us, turned to look.
