A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  This island was my parents’ point of departure from all traces of Ellis Island, a midway point before melding in, and here they carefully walked hand in hand on weekends and were inseparable during the week in their store and after hours in our home, which was more or less an annex of the store. They had earlier bought a white cottage by the sea on the northern end of the island, but after my birth in 1932—in the fourth year of their marriage—my mother did not want to be so far away from the store during those hours she was caring for me, and so she encouraged my father to move the business into a building that had an upper floor. This he did almost immediately, renting a two-story commercial property on the main street for a few years until he was able to purchase a large brick building two doors away that had been the site of the town’s second weekly newspaper, an enterprise that had recently gone bankrupt and that my father acquired on excellent terms during the years of the Great Depression.

  Mirrors are what I most remember about living in that spacious apartment, large—ten-by-twelve-foot—mirrors that covered the portable partitions that concealed the bedrooms in the rear area, which had once been occupied by linotype machines, and smaller mirrors that had been mismeasured or otherwise found inappropriate for the store below and were affixed to the walls upstairs in various places, reflecting every feature and piece of furniture existing in that wide and high-ceilinged hundred-foot-long room that we called home but could have been better utilized as a dance studio. In fact, my parents occasionally used it as that, and perhaps my earliest consciousness of the harmony and interiority of their relationship occurred one evening when, as they heard waltz music coming from their favorite classical radio station in Philadelphia, they suddenly interrupted a discussion they had been having with me to stand up and embrace each other, and then to begin dancing around the room for ten or fifteen minutes without ever once turning to look in my direction, to wave or wink or otherwise acknowledge that I was in the room, next to the coffee table, where they had left me, sitting on one of the red leather chairs that matched the ones used by my mother in her shop. I was then eleven or twelve, and while I do not wish at this late date to try to revive and interpret my emotions of more than a half century ago—other than to concede that I would never in my life feel comfortable on a dance floor, nor would I ever accept an invitation to a dinner dance—I do recall feeling miserable at the time and being misty-eyed when my parents paused to turn off the radio and the room lights, and, before heading toward the rear of the apartment together, to call out and remind me that it was well past my bedtime, that my sister had been asleep for hours, and that tomorrow was a school day.

  One might assume if one were unlike myself that I would have used the remoteness I felt from my parents to my own advantage, that I would have gone off and done as I pleased, would have cultivated my own separateness, would have disappeared for hours and maybe even run away from home—would they even have noticed?—or that at the very least I would have a boyhood history that would venture well beyond parental reflections in the mirrored room by which I measured myself. But I was captivated by the two of them, was in awe of them; they were the romantic leads in my ongoing interior movie. My slender and stylishly brunette mother was a stand-in for my favorite actress, Gene Tierney, and my custom-suited, rather exotic father was a second Valentino. I also felt captured with my parents in the confining complexity that prevailed in our household during the World War II years, when my father’s homeland was allied with the Nazis and his brothers were armed to confront the Allied invasion.

  In public my mother and father always behaved patriotically in the politically conservative community in which we lived. Like the other merchants on the block, my father each morning carried an American flag on a twelve-foot pole out to the sidewalk in front of the shop and inserted it in a hole near the curb. My father also joined a local citizens group that surveyed our coastline around the clock for signs of enemy submarines, performing this task at a time when great numbers of Italians in America were declared enemy aliens and when many were interned at a camp in Montana. Other Italians living within coastal communities were sometimes forced to move inland and surrender to the Coast Guard any fishing boats they had. One who relinquished his boat and temporarily vacated his home along the northern California coastline was the Sicilian-born father of the baseball star Joe DiMaggio.

  While my father’s commitment to America was never openly questioned in our town as far as I knew, he nonetheless always spoke in public with the same care as he dressed and comported himself, and this remained equally true after the war. My father never discussed the war with me directly, and in this case I welcomed his aloofness. I had learned enough about the war from the Saturday-afternoon newsreels and from two of my tough Irish classmates in parochial school. After one of their uncles had died in action as an American infantryman while attacking the Anzio coastal area, the boys began referring to me in the school yard as “Mussolini” and “dago bastard,” insulting me in voices just quiet enough to be unheard by the nuns; one day they followed me home and beat me up behind a vacant summertime hotel, slashing my left wrist with a long nail, which left a scar I can see today.

  I remember running frantically through my parents’ shop, dripping blood on the rug, alarming my mother and her customers, and not stopping until I had reached my father back in the alteration room, where, after examining my wrist and hearing my account of the incident, he comforted me while washing my wound and then wrapping it with strips of basting cloth. My mother was soon there as well, leaving her customers to be attended to by the salesgirl she had originally hired as a baby-sitter. Although the doctor’s office was only two blocks away, my mother and father took me there in their car, and during my week of recovery and my absence from school, my parents bestowed upon me the attention they usually reserved for each other. At the same time, however, my father did not want to hear me complaining any more about my wrist or the boys who had attacked me, nor did he file charges against them with the school.

  “Just forget about it,” he said; “you’ve only got a scratch.” And more than once he emphasized, “Don’t be a sissy.”

  My father’s solution to making me feel better was comparing our boyhoods in ways that portrayed his as far worse. He reminded me that back in 1914, when he was my age, his own father had suddenly died of an uncommon and untreated respiratory ailment, leaving his mother responsible for the rearing of her four children. There was a constant lack of food and coal throughout the postwar years in southern Italy, my father recalled, adding that on one particularly frosty night, while snow covered the nearby mountain peaks, a pack of prowling wolves descended into the village to terrify the people and devour dozens of chickens and pigs, until they themselves were annihilated by the shotgun fire of the angry and anxious men standing on balconies and rooftops. In the village of Maida, as my father described it, there was no escape from the ferocity of wild nature and misfortune. Here the hill people dwelled perilously under the mountain heights, from which rocks fell during earthquakes, and below them was the coastal area salvaged and thus made malarial by the Romans, but perhaps also avoided by the superstitious villagers because of its mythic association with the region’s sailor-swallowing sea monster Charybdis, as well as its being the entry point for the ships that had historically brought pirates and conquerors into southern Italy.

  During my father’s time in Italy, none of the villagers walked along the coast or learned how to swim, he told me, not having to acknowledge what I already knew: He himself did not swim, and during the seventeen years I lived in Ocean City prior to going away to Alabama, I believe that we as a family visited the beach on fewer than six occasions. We would situate ourselves closer to the dunes than the water, and after renting an umbrella and a pair of wood-framed folding canvas chairs stenciled with the name of the concessionaire, my parents in their dry bathing suits and white terry-cloth robes would spend the time in conversation, while my sister and I would kneel nearby with our
tin buckets and shovels, building castles and trying to dig deeply enough to reach the muddy water and feel the soft pricklings of the sand crabs scampering through our fingers. But should we venture out into the water and stand where the waves splashed around our knees, my father would quickly rise from his chair and come running out toward us and summon us back to the beach.

  And thus did I grow up along the Atlantic Ocean, instilled with my father’s boyhood fear of the Mediterranean Sea.

  6

  IN DEFERENCE TO MY MOTHER’S DEFICIENCIES IN THE KITCHEN, MY father would often drive us at night to a small hotel dining room in our community, or to a seaside inn across the bay, or to one of his favorite Italian restaurants in Atlantic City, where we would usually be greeted, served, and fed in a manner that brought a pleasant conclusion to the day.

  My mother, attired in one of the expensive suits or dresses she had been unable to sell the season before, enjoyed being seen in restaurants, regarding them as an extension of her showroom and a modeling opportunity for herself. The appeal of restaurants to my younger sister and myself was augmented by the fact that after dinner we were not expected, as we were at home, to clear the table and help with the dishes. And in my father’s case, quite apart from my mother’s cooking, I think that going to restaurants catered to a need in his nature that could never have been adequately satisfied at home.

  In restaurants he became a changed person, was less remote, less tense, more kindly and communicative than he ever was in our apartment or while working behind my mother’s boutique in the alteration room, where he spent the day lengthening or shortening dresses, or making a suit for one of the ever-decreasing number of men who valued his skills and would pay the high costs of a custom tailor. My father sometimes sewed silently for hours, listening to classical music on the radio or the record player, seemingly detached from all else around him; but when we dined out in Atlantic City, or in a larger Italian restaurant on certain weekends in Philadelphia, my father immediately and buoyantly burst into Italian while greeting and embracing the owners and waiters, who in some cases were natives of his area of Italy. And even though their language was entirely foreign to me, and remains so to this day, I immediately perceived its liberalizing effect upon my father, adding color to his countenance, a brightness to his expression, and as we settled down to dinner—our table was usually near the bar, where the owner sat on a stool, sipping wine and toasting each of our courses—my father continued to speak out animatedly and even exchanged jokes in his native tongue with his compatriots, doing this while gesturing freely with his hands and arms in a manner I had never seen at home.

  I had two fathers in this period of my life: a residential father and a restaurant father. Only with the latter was I happy as a son. And during my high school years, especially during moments when I was feeling most inadequate as a student, I saw myself as entering the restaurant business someday, owning an Italian restaurant that would appeal to men like my father and bring laughter into their lives, and in which I would stand out as a debonaire figure in a festive crowd, wearing a white dinner jacket like Humphrey Bogart in the film Casablanca, and having my own piano player, and buying drinks for my friends, and enjoying flirtation privileges with the pretty waitresses.

  From what I read in the newspaper columns by Walter Winchell and Leonard Lyons, the ownership of a successful restaurant was an easy and felicitous route to recognition and prosperity, an opportunity to become a celebrity’s celebrity in the way that Toots Shor had with America’s sports heroes, and Vincent Sardi had with the leading Broadway stars, and as the management at the “21” Club had with the nation’s business tycoons and their trophy wives.

  Long after my fantasies of restaurant ownership had faded and I settled instead for the life of a writer who uses restaurants as an escape from the solitude that my father had undoubtedly shared when he was sewing, I became a nightly patron not only of neighborhood places but also of such renowned establishments as the “21” Club, where I soon became accustomed to the handshakes and arm pats from the proprietors each time I entered into what surely is one of the great glad-hand centers of New York City. Here the faithful customer is welcomed not only by a primary greeter but by a virtual receiving line of bowing gentlemen courtiers who in an earlier age could have served the Sun King at Versailles. While I initially thought that the corridor of the “21” Club was overcrowded with greeters and strokers, it soon occurred to me that this restaurant had not prospered for more than sixty years by underestimating the insecurities of its leading customers. Indeed, it probably knew very well that most of its big expense-account clientele sensed that they were but a golden parachute away from having to bail out as the corporate boss, and when this happened, they would lose their prestigious table against the west wall in the dining room; but until it happened, they and their greeters at the door would reinforce one another with their handshakes and embraces, which linked the management of the restaurant with the management of the nation’s power and wealth.

  So at the “21” Club I saw on a grand scale what I had already glimpsed as a boy in New Jersey: restaurants as rooms of recognition, salutation, and reassurance. And I indulged in what they had to offer, which for me was not what was featured on the menu but, rather, the surrounding sights and sounds that drew me out of myself, a magical sprinkling of a certain spice in the gestalt that elevated me to levels of response and appreciation that I often experienced when attending the theater.

  The lighting in the better restaurants is, in fact, often arranged by Broadway stage technicians who view dining rooms as sets and manipulate the mood of the evening meal with a luminescence that will display most enhancingly the character of the clientele that is most fundamental to the restaurant’s image and financial stability. If the restaurant is what one technician described to me as a “high-energy” place, a trendy spot for young couples and what he called “the beautiful people,” then the lighting should be bright and intense “because everybody wants to see who’s there.” In the more sedate and elegant restaurants intended for an older affluent crowd, the light bouncing off the table linen onto the diners’ faces should be quite soft and intimate, he said, but not physically revealing. “Everyone must look younger,” he explained, adding that a pinkish light is often used to achieve this effect, as it is by morticians upon caskets in viewing rooms in order to put the best face on the dead. In restaurants and clubs aimed primarily at a homosexual following, he went on, the lighting is customarily very dark and indirect, “taking into account that a number of people in the place prefer a bit of privacy. They want to survey the room, and maybe even cruise a little, without it appearing to be too obvious.”

  Whether it is the influence of the lighting, or the accompanying liquor that one consumes, or the supplementary sense of release and stimulation that captivates people like me after I leave my desk and join a lively and amiable gathering composed primarily of strangers closely quartered within rooms that are ideal for making eye contact and assumptions that have little to do with reality, I have come to regard restaurants as extensions of the proscenium, as centers for grand entrances and exits, as showcases for drawing room scenes and improvisational sketches, as location sites for mysterious plots and shady transactions, as venues for romantic encounters and illicit trysts and potential gangland bloodbaths and burlesque sideshows of the sort I saw in a Manhattan restaurant one night when a middle-aged man from the bar approached the table of the movie star Anthony Quinn and proceeded to masterfully impersonate the actor’s dance steps and movements from Zorba the Greek—an imitation that brought applause from around the room, but only scowls from Quinn, prompting the maître d’ to toss the star’s dancing rival out into the street.

  “Dinner lubricates business,” wrote James Boswell, but I believe he was referring primarily to lunch, for during the daylight the dramaturgy in restaurants is more methodical and less whimsical than it is at night; lunchtime is more sober, more programmed, more conducive to
shoptalk and sales figures than the figures seen at night wearing dresses and skirts, not all of them worn by women. At night restaurants reflect more fully the variety of roles that they are playing in people’s lives at this time when millions of Americans in major cities are dining out, on average, four nights a week, according to the Zagat survey, and when more and more women, like my pioneering mother, serve the needs of their jobs during the day and at night expect dinner to be served by someone else.

  Restaurants are echo chambers for veteran eavesdroppers like myself. Even when partaking in the conversations at my own table, I am often tuned in to the talk of people seated nearby, silently sharing in their debates and arguments, their confessions and restitutions, their jokes and rumormongering, their attempts at seduction and their efforts to extricate themselves from deeper romantic involvements. A tearful young woman at a table next to mine at Cafe Luxembourg in the West Seventies in Manhattan is telling her gray-haired companion that she wants to leave her husband, but her companion, shaking his head and touching her arm, responds, “Darling, you promised we weren’t going to talk this way.…” Nights later, from behind me at Coco Pazzo on East Seventy-fourth Street, someone is saying, “I hear Perelman’s looking to unload Revlon,” and his dinner partner says, “Bullshit.” During the following week, at Elio’s on Second Avenue, I sit near a large table where the talk is all about book publishing and real estate prices in the Hamptons. And on a subsequent evening, I am farther uptown at Elaine’s, where I go so often that I rarely hear or observe anything new.

  I have known the proprietress, Elaine Kaufman, for more than thirty-five years, having met her in the early 1960s, soon after she took over a failing Austro-Hungarian tavern on Second Avenue near Eighty-eighth Street called Gambrino; after renaming it in her honor, she gradually converted it into a late-night gathering place for writers and other creative people whom she went out of her way to cultivate. She had been an avid reader of literary works since her girlhood in Queens, and in later years, during her off-hours as a waitress in Greenwich Village, she attended poetry readings, art shows, and the avant-garde theater. When she moved uptown to start Elaine’s in 1963, she might well have been the only restaurateur in New York who had ever finished reading a book.