A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

When Le Premier held its gala opening in mid-September 1977, Jackie Ho was in Hong Kong, but J. Z. Morris was there along with two hundred other guests, including myself. While I did not meet Morris on this occasion, I did shake hands with the restaurant’s principal owner, a suave and handsome dark-haired man of twenty-eight from Grenoble named Robert Pascal. The latter stood in the front of the main dining room, posing for photographers with an arm around his girlfriend, the Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, daughter of Aly Khan and the movie star Rita Hayworth.

  “Oh, this is going to be a massacre,” Robert Pascal called out to a crowd of well-wishers, and by this he meant that he was about to slay New York’s dining public and his rival restaurateurs with the seductive power of Le Premier’s cuisine, and the allure of its ambience, and surely the presence of such appealing women as his current companion. Robert Pascal, as I would get to know him in the weeks and months ahead, was never lacking in assuredness and audacity.

  But the “massacre” he had envisioned on opening night was hardly what he later got when the reviews by the food critics began to appear in print. They generally castigated the work of the cooks he had hired and accused his waiters of being haughty and negligent, and, in the words of the Times’s Mimi Sheraton, the female figures depicted in the wall murals were “whimsically pornographic” in a way that some patrons “may well find embarrassing if not downright insulting.” Invoking the Times’s fourstar rating system, she gave only one star to Le Premier, calling its wine list “outrageously overpriced,” the cold fish pâté “rubbery and bland,” the quail “slightly overcooked,” and the poached bass “strangely dense and hard,” having “a slight petroleum oil taste that came through despite its excellent sauce.” She also criticized the restaurant’s policy of serving dinner either at 7:00 or 9:30 p.m. This “tyranny of two seatings,” she said, was being imposed for the convenience of the proprietor rather than that of the patrons, and she also observed that the proprietor and a few of his waiters were in need of a closer shave. Robert Pascal’s choice in table appointments also disappointed her; instead of drinking wine in glasses with rounded edges, she would have preferred cut-edged goblets that were more expensive but more delicate and harmonious with the restaurant’s high prices. “Sugar was also presented as wrapped cubes and in paper packets,” she noted, and while “tidier perhaps for waiters,” it was unacceptable in a place where “elegance is obviously the name of the game.”

  The unfavorable review in the Times disturbed as well as surprised Pascal, for among his satisfied customers during Le Premier’s first month of operation was the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and the publisher’s special assistant, Sydney Gruson. Gruson had first met Pascal while patronizing the latter’s older restaurant farther uptown—Chez Pascal, at 151 East 82nd—and it was Gruson who had introduced Sulzberger to Le Premier; and since Mimi Sheraton at this point had not yet reviewed it, Gruson promised Pascal that he would see her in the office and put in a good word about Le Premier’s food and the decor and suggest that she stop in at her earliest convenience.

  During the ensuing weeks, she appeared on three occasions, once for lunch and twice for dinner. Since the table reservations had always been made in the name of one of her accompanying friends, neither Robert Pascal nor his staff was aware of Mimi Sheraton’s presence, nor did Pascal have any idea what Gruson might have said to her, if indeed he had actually gone ahead and approached her. As Robert Pascal later explained to me—a few days after the printing of her review—he could well understand her resentment if she had gotten the impression from Gruson that he had been trying to influence her integrity as a critic.

  In any case, her review in the Times did great damage to his restaurant, cutting business in half almost immediately, and prompting his partners—who now saw their huge investment going down the drain of Le Premier’s newly installed pipes—to sue Mimi Sheraton for slander. She had overstepped her legal rights with regard to fair comment, they concluded, and now no amount of advertising on their part could offset the effect of what she had written in the all-powerful Times. Robert Pascal, however, vetoed their proposal to sue. It would only draw more attention to her review, he said, and furthermore, he believed that Le Premier could survive, as Broadway shows sometimes survived, the initial wrath of even critics from the Times.

  But as his business failed to improve throughout 1977 and 1978, and as Gruson and Sulzberger no longer came to dine, and as the Princess Yasmin Aga Khan drifted out of his life amicably but forever, and as he could not attract additional customers even after reducing the food and beverage prices and removing the most erotic of the “whimsically pornographic” murals from the walls, Robert Pascal finally decided, in December 1978, to relinquish his authority over Le Premier. He and his backers agreed, for a sum of $800,000, to turn over the restaurant, its fixtures and its furniture, and the eight years that remained on its ten-year lease, to a new group of investors headed by a specialist in tax shelters.

  The restaurant would be renamed Bistro Pascal, with Robert Pascal expected to stay on as a greeter and consultant; but he would show up infrequently after the change in management had been completed in January 1979. Never one to linger long in places where he was not in charge, and always convinced that he would sooner or later meet new risk-taking financiers who would be swayed by his irrepressible optimism and would bankroll his next bold adventure, Robert Pascal was suddenly back in the money in 1980 with a hit restaurant in New York. It was located on the site of a former steak house at 334 East 74th Street, and, like the French play and the film that had inspired its name—La Cage aux Folles—its theme and artifice were centered on transvestism. Pascal’s waiters wore dresses, and the male singers who entertained the dinner crowd were female impersonators representing well-known movie actresses and other show business personalities.

  The idea of starting such a restaurant occurred to Pascal one afternoon when, not long after the closing of Le Premier, he was alone in a New York movie theater seeing the French farce for the third or fourth time (it had been voted the best foreign film of 1979 and had earned an Oscar nomination for its director). Each time he saw it, Pascal was over-whelmed by the hilarious and zany performances of the two leading characters on the screen—one of whom, the French actor Michel Serrault, portrayed an aging transvestite, while the latter’s young drag queen partner was played by the Italian movie star Ugo Tognazzi.

  After Pascal had urged some of his affluent New York friends to see La Cage aux Folles, and after they had reported back their enthusiasm for the film’s wit and wisdom, he sold them on the idea of backing his restaurant rendition of La Cage aux Folles. It opened in New York in November 1980, and during the following spring, encouraged by the restaurant’s success, the Pascal partnership launched a La Cage aux Folles in the West Hollywood section of Los Angeles. Subsequently, there would be La Cage restaurants in San Francisco, Toronto, Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and Miami Beach.

  Pascal was active only in the Miami Beach franchise after selling out his share in the Los Angeles Cage in 1982. At this time he was suffering from throat cancer, and his doctor warned him that if he did not eschew cigarettes (Pascal was smoking three packs a day), he would be dead within a year. Though he was then in his early thirties, he decided that he liked cigarettes more than he feared dying young; so he kept smoking and he lived on for decades, entering the twenty-first century with a raspy voice but otherwise as talkative and persuasive as ever.

  After relocating himself permanently in Miami in the mid-1980s, he would meet and marry a wealthy divorcée who was a designer of flashy fashion (best known for her crystal rhinestone sweatshirts), and Pascal would also find financing for several new restaurants in and around Miami Beach—Villa Pascal, Pascal’s Pascal, and, among others, La Voile Rouge (The Red Sail), which he named in honor of La Voile Rouge in Saint-Tropez, a topless beach club where he had begun his career as a teenage waiter.

  Meanwhile, the New York restaurant at 206 East 63
rd Street that bore his name, if not his presence and interest—the Bistro Pascal—had gone out of business in July 1983. I had patronized it once or twice after Pascal had sold it, and I assumed, since there was little else to recommend it, that it had remained open for two and a half years because it satisfied the hunger of its tax-shelter partnership for write-offs. Then, in the late summer of 1984, after the Bistro Pascal floor space had been vacated for about a year, my friend Nicola Spagnolo learned about it—and, over the angry and anguished reaction of his wife, Linda, he decided it would become the locale of his forthcoming Gnolo.

  “Linda says the place has bad karma,” Nicola told me over the phone in the fall of 1984, five weeks before Gnolo’s scheduled opening. “I made the mistake of letting her see the place before we fixed it up.” I later learned from Linda that she had gone several times to 206 East 63rd Street while it was being renovated and repainted, pleading constantly with her husband and his partners to cancel their plans, to annul the lease and thus avoid the financial disaster that she foresaw there.

  “What do you know about restaurants?” Nicola had asked with irritation after she had interrupted one of his meetings with the decorators.

  “I’m telling you, I have premonitions about this place,” she said.

  “Well, why don’t you go upstairs and get a job with the fortune-tellers on the third floor?” he responded, adding, “Look, I’ve been in restaurants all my life, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.…”

  While it was true that she could not articulate her trepidation, it was also true, as she explained to me, that she had never been more sure about anything in her life: Her husband was headed for a fall, and she had sensed this almost immediately after her initial visit to 206 East 63rd. Although it had been a sunny afternoon as she and her husband had stepped out of the taxicab, the old brick building itself was overcast in the shadows of the high-rises; and while he and his workmen gathered around the bar to examine the floor plans, she wandered off by herself through the aisles of the dust-covered dining room, which was dimly lit by low-wattage bulbs and was reflected murkily in the smoked-glass mirrors left hanging by the departed souls of the Bistro Pascal. All around her were upturned chairs stacked atop tables, crate boxes filled with plates, and, on the upper rung of a wooden ladder, a white telephone with its cords cut. No amount of remodeling or renovating would alter her low opinion of this place, and what also bothered her was what she had seen outside—the sun-blocked sidewalk, the scarcity of shops, the sterile architecture of the modern buildings that lined the street, and the reckless pace of the speedy motorists heading west along Sixty-third Street toward Third Avenue; one of them had nearly crashed into the back of the taxicab that she and Nicola had ridden in on their way here. Unlike her residential area in the East Eighties, this part of Sixty-third Street lacked neighborliness, and, as she asked herself, how could her husband expect to establish a successful restaurant on a one-way street that was a motorists’ speedway and was unappealing to pedestrians?

  She had questioned Nicola about this on the way home, but he had paid little attention. He insisted that 206 East 63rd represented a rare opportunity, and he reminded her that many of New York’s most appealing restaurants existed in unappealing neighborhoods. He recalled that when Elaine Kaufman introduced her place on Second Avenue near Eighty-eighth Street, it was said that she would fail because it was in a remote and run-down area, along a heavily trafficked one-way street. He also pointed out that a family-style Italian restaurant called Rao’s had prospered for more than eighty years in Harlem. It is not the neighborhood that influences the fate of a restaurant, he instructed his wife, but, rather, the neighborliness of the restaurant, the welcoming personality of the owner, and the romantic aura exuding throughout the premises while dinner is being served. Yes, Linda had agreed, but what if that romantic aura is star-crossed or jinxed? What if there is something inherently wrong with 206 East 63rd Street that no restaurateur can fix?

  “Oh, she won’t let up,” Nicola told me on the phone a few days before Gnolo’s opening. “Linda’s Jewish, but she sounds like those Italians I grew up with and left behind in the Old Country. They were always seeing the dark side, always having bad premonitions. Except for people like Linda, the Italians are the most pessimistic people in the world.”

  “Yes,” I said, “my father used to say that,” explaining that in his part of Italy the people are so concentrated on the possibility of adversity, are so spooked by the idea of this powerful spirit of misfortune, that they have a name for it. They call it the Jettatura. It is their “patron saint” of bad luck. It is the prophet that nobody prays to, that everyone loathes, and that remains omnipresent in their lives.

  I was probably telling Nicola more than he wanted to know, but since he did not interrupt, and since I myself was not so emancipated from my Italian heritage to risk debunking the stature of the Jettatura, I related more of what my father had told me about this odious spirit. It had risen to prominence during the Dark Ages in southern Italy, evolving out of medieval Catholic mysticism, and it easily perpetuated itself through subsequent centuries marked by plagues, earthquakes, droughts, famines, barbarous invasions, and other abominations and vexations that gradually established a gloom-ridden, amulet-addicted society that dreaded nothing more than more of the Jettatura.

  “Okay, enough of this crap,” Nicola finally said, cutting in. “It’s all nonsense. And I won’t let you or Linda mess up my head with this stuff.”

  “That wasn’t my intention,” I said.

  “I don’t care,” Nicola said. “I’m in America now, and I couldn’t care less about your Jettatura, or Linda’s Jewish Jettatura. All I know is that within a few days I’m opening up my new restaurant on Sixty-third Street. And everything’s going to be great.”

  10

  WHILE IT LACKED THE FLAMBOYANCE OF THE INTRODUCTORY party to Le Premier that I attended in 1977—a black-tie event where most of the guests arrived by limousine—the first-nighters who went by taxi or on foot to Gnolo in early December 1984 were, in my opinion, a less trendy group of restaurantgoers, who were beyond being dictated to by food critics and who, having a long-standing relationship with Nicola Spagnolo going back to his days at Elaine’s, would now support him in his quest for a bright future in this darkly shadowed building at 206 East 63rd Street.

  Nan and I had a good time at the opening of Gnolo. I was particularly impressed by how cheerful Linda seemed to be, smiling as she stood next to her husband near the entranceway, welcoming more than one hundred old friends and acquaintances. Nicola could barely contain his excitement, vigorously shaking hands and often kissing people on both cheeks; and yet, energized as he undoubtedly was by the surrounding goodwill and merriment, I doubted that he would ever allow himself to be carried away by excessive confidence and repeat the mistakes that Robert Pascal had previously made at 206 East 63rd Street.

  Shortly after Pascal had opened Le Premier in 1977, someone had stolen the restaurant’s name plate from the front of the building, signaling the beginning of Pascal’s identity problems at this address. He gave the impression not only that his establishment aimed to please the city’s epicureans and the beautiful people but that it was probably beyond the appreciation and means of the neighborhood’s residents. He was also presumptuous in labeling Le Premier a top-notch restaurant before the food critics had gotten around to judging it for themselves. In his opening-day advertising he boasted that Le Premier was “the finest restaurant on this side of the Atlantic,” and he pointed out as well that the second-floor dining area was “designed to cater to the tastes of only 500 preferred customers,” who would have access to the reservation manager’s unlisted phone numbers. When these preferred customers started going to Le Premier, they usually did so in limousines driven by chauffeurs who were used to double-parking and waiting for hours while their employers had dinner. This caused much congestion, of course, inciting endless horn honking from other motorists backed u
p in traffic jams and disturbing the dwellers in the apartment buildings, prompting their angry calls to the precinct house and their growing disenchantment with the existence of Le Premier.

  But the crowd that Robert Pascal catered to—the perk-privileged CEOs, the international financiers, the jet-setters whom he could flatter in any of four languages, and regularly did—also required the reassurance that they were dining in the right place, and when the New York Times critic condemned the restaurant, they abandoned it. I felt sure that the Gnolo crowd would not have reacted in this manner; they were more intellectual, more independently minded, more like the customers Nicola had gotten to know at Elaine’s. If Mimi Sheraton had written that Elaine’s served the worst food in New York and that rats were running loose in the kitchen, I doubt that she would have drawn away a single customer. In fact, I recall reading a news article in the Times about Elaine’s being cited for violations by New York City health inspectors, and that night every table was occupied.

  The decor of Gnolo was as simple and basic as that at Elaine’s, although Nicola refrained from adorning his beige-colored walls with photographs of writers or other people he had first met at Elaine’s. He did not want to hear again from Elaine Kaufman’s attorney. The opening of Gnolo in late October was sooner than Nicola might have preferred, since not all the remodeling had been completed. But at the suggestion of one of his partners, he pressed the workmen to get the place ready for the holiday season in the interest of drawing diners from among the Christmas shoppers and also to make Gnolo available for the office parties that some of his partners’ acquaintances in the business world had promised to hold on the second floor.

  The pre-Christmas opening turned out to be a very profitable decision. The restaurant was filled to capacity almost every night, being patronized frequently by many of Elaine’s regulars, including myself; and Nicola’s wife, Linda—who could gauge the restaurant’s success because she kept the books—was ready to forget her premonitions and concede that her husband seemed to know what he was doing. By mid-December, however, a week or so before Christmas, Linda was not so sure. The first of what would be a number of unfortunate incidents occurred when a drunken man, while attending an office party on the second floor, toppled through the open door of the dumbwaiter—which was in the process of being rebuilt—and came crashing down through the chute onto a tile counter in the first-floor kitchen. He broke a few bones and damaged his spine, and on the following morning his attorney informed Nicola of an impending lawsuit for negligence.