Insatiable

by Gael Greene

  The food emerging from Michel Guérard’s kitchen that day was unlike any other I’d ever tasted. His merlan braisée après Fernand Point was typically bold. Whiting, while definitely low-caste, was nothing I’d ever spotted on a menu in an ambitious maison. In homage to the great Fernand Point in Vienne, where many of the three-star chefs had prepped, Guérard’s firm wraith of whiting rode to the table on a bed of tomato, shallot, and mushroom bits—in a pool of its cooking liquid, reduced to an intense bouquet and then thickened by the whisking in of a ton of butter. Our uncontrollable whimpers of pleasure escalated with the first shock of a gossamer mousseline de brochet—nothing but pike beaten to a pulp with cream, so light that it seemed to float right off the plate, its free-form dive arrested only by nubbin of lobster in the Nantua sauce.

  Fricassée de volaille au vinaigre seemed daring, too. It was the first time I’d confronted what would eventually become a nouvelle cuisine cliché—the bird thrillingly moist, its sauce gaspingly tangy. I imagine even now I am tasting for the first time Michel’s riff on sweetbreads—batons of the delicate organ, tossed with sticks of truffle, foie gras, and ham, the nutty warmth of cream that filled my mouth. I’m not really sure why I loved it so much. This dish was cute, while the rest was astonishing.

  Guérard had begun his kitchen career at the pastry station and won a rare Meilleur Ouvrier award in pâtisserie, so his desserts were remarkable. I remember square balloons of puff pastry more delicate than any I’d ever tasted—shards of buttery leaves filled with the unbearable lightness of crème chantilly cushioning a layering of pear, each slice beatified with a tinge of caramel. And the piercing sorbets, cassis that day, that not only revived the overwhelmed palate but cleared every corner of the brain, so that somehow it was possible to enjoy the coda of minitarts and chocolate truffles. As for me and this appealing woman, the harmony of our irrepressible cries was striking. I felt we could be the Supremes of the table.

  I was never a hapless tourist in France again. From that moment on, I found myself adopted by Yanou Collart, mythic mover and shaker in her world. She was irrepressibly self-involved yet astonishingly generous. I was now a favored nation, a VIP—or as we say in France, un grand fromage, a big cheese—wherever I went on Yanou’s advice and her staff’s reservation. It was a delicate balancing act for me because, of course, it was no secret that Yanou was the chefs’ noisemaker—that’s what she did for a living and her client list grew over the years: restaurants, hotels, spas, films and theater, movie stars. Her inventive campaigns and a highly personal touch with demanding movie stars paid for the vast office/apartment on the rue François Premier, a floor or two below Alain Delon’s. She had everything I wanted—glamour, sapphires, closet space, couturier samples, a waistline that belied her appetite, tits that stayed up all by themselves, and a refrigerator with nothing inside but champagne, water, orchids, and boxes of chocolates. I never saw her with a special man, and I had my loving husband—I still thought—even though he seemed reluctant to tear himself away from work to sit by my side on these obligatory overseas tours of duty. But she was always with friends, fermenting delicious fun, and never seemed lonely.

  It wasn’t possible to know if Lionel Poilâne, the master bread baker, and the proprietor of L’Ami Louis (the ultimate joint even today for food that is only about quality and season) and the sculptor Cesar (she wore his rectangle of smashed gold on a chain around her neck) were clients of Yanou or simply good pals or admired artists crucial to her matchmaking prowess. Did she represent Regine? Somehow, Yanou could always get a last-minute table. If a movie star wanted a table and a restaurant wanted a movie star, voilà. Call Yanou. She took care of a constellation of movie stars. (Jack Nicholson told Food Arts that in twenty years he’d “seen her move more people around better than the Chicago Bears.” Later, she would work for the pope and the Dalai Lama, but in those early days she was just creeping into our hearts, establishing her image as an adorable fixer.

  I knew she needed me as much as I needed her. My reports from abroad in New York brought cuisinary ingenues clamoring for tables. So we both pretended we could keep it pure. Or at least I did, probably being a shade more naïve. And she became my guru, a confidante, the woman whose coaching and coddling were prepping me to be the knowing guide to New York’s affluent foodie readers. She claimed she always respected my need for anonymity, making my reservations in the nom de fourchette on my credit card. But who was kidding whom? I struggled to keep my critical faculties clicking while chefs pretending not to know my provenance and mission fussed and dispatched little extras from the kitchen.

  Lists of what was new and hot, clients or not, were ready each time I arrived in Paris, printed in the pale brown ink of her typewriter ribbon, and her assistant stood by to demand a table in overbooked rooms at the prime dinner hour. Perhaps if the restaurant wasn’t a client, I might actually be anonymous, but even so, maître d’s tended to flutter and the chef’s welcoming giveaways, amuse-gueles (before the phrase was gentrified to amuse-bouches), tended to multiply. Faithful readers could organize their own truffle tours, carrying New York magazine clippings, ordering what I’d loved . . . poised to feel the earth move. Oh, it was heady stuff.

  When visiting Paris solo, I often stayed at Yanou’s, with its soft, sink-into velvet sofas and piles of cushions, the Art Deco vases and floor lamps, her collection of pocket watches under glass, the mirrored consoles and the mirrored bath with hundreds of dollars’ worth of fancy soap piled in a giant seashell. I slept in a camp bed in the guest room, surrounded by dozens of photographs of Yanou, stylish Yanou, Yanou in hats, in Patrick Clark’s buttons the year of his couturier succès fou, in all the evolving hairdos of the decades. Yanou with her friends: Yanou and Clint, Yanou and Charles Aznavour, Yanou and Yves Montand. Yanou with Bocuse. With a dozen stars I recognized from French film, male and female. With Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Kirk Douglas and his wife. With James Coburn, Peter O’Toole, Michael Caine. Sometimes she is gazing at them in rapture. Sometimes the gaze is returned. I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that this might be a rogue’s gallery of romantic conquests. Not at all. I have no idea if Yanou slept with any of them. On this aspect of her past, she was uncharacteristically discreet. There was a mysterious someone, I knew, but we’d never met.

  Over the years, the Yanou documentary collection grew, obscuring the walls. There she was with Danny Kaye. I introduced her to Danny (I’d met him through his daughter Dena, a writer friend who lived across the street from me in New York). Danny seemed quite smitten with Yanou. Of course, he was a certified food nut, too, and a food lover’s life with Yanou pulling the strings was addictively delicious.

  I also introduced her to Craig Claiborne. Now that I think of it, that was worth a few of the hundred phone calls she made for me. Entrée to the New York Times. What a coup. Yanou took Craig on the fast train to Lyon to meet and interview Paul Bocuse. Escorted by Yanou, Craig was first to write about Alain Ducasse, newly installed at the Louis XV in Monte Carlo’s Hôtel de Paris, where he would gather three Michelin stars faster than any chef ever had.

  Craig was putty in Yanou’s hands. He was in love with Yanou, too. A friend who played host to Yanou many Augusts in East Hampton recalls Craig almost falling into the pool the first time Yanou leaped up from her chaise to greet him topless. Topless sunning was rare in the Hamptons then, but on Yanou, petite and slim, already bronzed, topless looked fresh, rather like the demure nudes cavorting on the walls at George Lang’s Café des Artistes. Even though Craig’s sexual yen was for men, he seemed to have a special fondness for women’s breasts. I suppose it could have had something to do with southern fried chicken, poulet de Bresse, his mammy, or even his mother, but I won’t even try to guess.

  “I think that if I could have been happy with any woman,” he once told me, “it would have been Yanou.”

  One evening, Yanou and I were descending a restaurant staircase after having dinner together, when I recognized Omar Sharif surre
ndering his coat to the cloakroom attendant below.

  “Oh, Yanou,” he cried. I stood there, my heart pounding at the sight of his beauty—he was even handsomer in three dimensions—as he caught her up in his arms and kissed her on the mouth. I walked ahead, the soul of discretion, as they gabbled away in French. Then she came up beside me, smiling and aglow.

  “I can check into a hotel for the night,” I offered. “No problem, honest.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I would never be unfaithful to . . . you know.”

  My prime position in Yanou’s bulging Rolodex brought one sybaritic revel after another. She included me, and Craig, too, among a handful of journalists invited in the winter of 1977 to join a gaggle of two- and three-star Michelin chefs from France, Belgium, and Germany to tour India and discover the genius of Indian cooking, courtesy of the Taj Hotels. What a glorious boondoggle. The Taj people created whole villages with dozens of artisans and hunting camps with waiters dressed as gun bearers to amuse us. In Bombay, we mingled with movie stars, politicians, and bejeweled gentry at a faux Parsi wedding feast minus the bride and groom. In Jaipur, elephants waited to carry us to the Taj Rambagh Palace as young boys in exotic dress and on horseback heralded our arrival with drums and horns, and sari-wrapped beauties danced on the front steps, waiting to drape us in jasmine and carnation leis.

  That night, we found sequined chiffon saris in our rooms and a call to join Jaipur society at the maharajah’s palace for dinner. The maharajah (“Bubbles” to his intimates) signaled everyone to join him cross-legged on the floor along the edge of a vast brightly colored rug, a thousand and one nights of weaving and big enough so the entire cast of a hundred or so could sit, knees grazing, while servants distributed dinner—mysterious stews, fiery pickles, and puffy breads—on individual round silver trays.

  As always, Yanou was a star, trailing scarlet chiffon, rising gracefully at the end of that dinner when the maharajah said something in Hindi as well as in English and a dozen young women, all in yellow saris, got up to dance. Gamely, Yanou imitated each step and gesture of the lithe beauties as the locals rolled their eyes and giggled. “It is the dance of the virgins, you know,” my neighbor confided, “the virgins’ salute to spring.” I like to think no one spoiled that moment by telling her. Yanou was bigger than spring. She was bigger than life.

  16

  CAN THIS BE LOVE, OR IS IT AN INTOXICATION OF BUTTER?

  COMBUSTIBLE LUST WAS NOT ALL THAT MOTIVATED MY SEXUAL BRAVADO in the early seventies. I was finally driven to begin scouting another mate. I still loved Don. I could not imagine not loving him. I had told myself we would be together as long as it was good, and I’d come to count on this perfect “we” as the foundation of everything I did, my strength, my security. But clearly something was wrong. We handed over our psyches, each to our own therapist, and together we saw a marriage counselor. But I felt his deep unhappiness eating into my energy, bringing me down.

  For me it was like winning a key to the city when Times managing editor Arthur Gelb nominated Don to be culture editor. As kultur maven, Don rated second-night tickets to every Broadway show that opened, gallery invitations, house seats at the ballet, and dozens of new records every week (the Doors, the Tramps, the Beatles, Ray Charles—cellophane-wrapped, free). But Don, who had thrived at the Trib in its most creative period under Jim Bellows, was really a tabloid kind of guy. “It’s like working at an insurance company,” he had complained. But he was proud to have opened a window and swept out a little fustiness. He fought for theater critic Clive Barnes’s use of the word cunnilingus in a review of The Beard, a play that featured exactly that—onstage.

  “Isn’t there a scientific word we can use?” Arthur Gelb had asked.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Don told him. “Cunnilingus.”

  The decision went all the way up to Sulzberger, and cunnilingus it was. But from what Don told me, there were not many triumphs that came close to that one.

  In Detroit, my sister, diagnosed with breast cancer, had refused a mastectomy, standard treatment at that time, and found a hospital to excise just the tumor. But her disease was unusually virulent and she’d had a recurrence. After a childhood of intense competition, Margie and I had become close, by telephone mostly, only in the previous few years, when, after years of sexual prudery, she discovered extramarital adventure and turned to me as the expert.

  Terrified and threatened—devastated to lose the breast and the lovely cleavage she had displayed in deep décolletage for some years—she had decided to leave her husband and live as passionately as she could in the time she had. Her three young children were in a panic. First cancer, then divorce. I flew to Detroit to see her and be there for my anguished mother.

  Suddenly, it seemed that life had no reward for procrastination. What was I waiting for?

  I never suspected Don had actually been unfaithful. Even while I was flitting around like a happily deranged hummingbird in a field of lilies, I never dreamed he was playing around, too. If I’d known, I might have made a strong move sooner. I was sure I had convinced him he was incapable of lying. “Your pupils dilate when you try to lie,” I told him. “I can always tell.”

  And he would agree: “I can never lie to you.”

  One Monday, he called from the Times to say he’d be home late, not to bother with dinner, because he wanted to see Joe Egg—a Broadway show I’d already seen and raved about.

  “Oh great,” I said. “You’ll love it.”

  I felt vaguely uncomfortable. Something was not right. I looked at the newspaper. Of course, the theaters were closed on Monday.

  “How did you like Joe Egg?” I asked as he came in the door and tossed a Joe Egg Playbill on the table. Good grief. Even a Playbill. No trick at all for the culture editor of the Times.

  “Great. Wonderful. So sad.”

  “The theater is closed on Monday,” I said.

  He fell into his chair and covered his face with his hands.

  “So where were you?”

  There was this young woman in his department. With a crush on him. So vulnerable. So troubled. So needy. He’d agreed to have dinner at her place.

  “Did you have sex?”

  “Of course not.”

  I looked at his eyes. His pupils were very small.

  “Did you kiss?”

  “Nothing. A kiss.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “Lamb chops.”

  “That’s it? Just lamb chops? Not even a vegetable? Nothing green?”

  He stared at me. “Pumpkin. Darling.” And he pulled me into his arms.

  Even though I was blind to what should have been obvious, with all the wise therapists and know-it-all-marriage counselors tending our psyches, I was forced to see a certain corrosion. I’d been playing around all this time without his guessing, but still I thought I knew him too well not to know. Since I had so much emotional stock invested in this “we,” I needed to believe there was another man for me somewhere just around the corner, perfect for me as Don had been so perfect, and he wouldn’t be haunted by eighteen-year-old bodies as Don confessed he was. For a long time, I thought that man was Murray Fisher. What is it about editors? He was a brilliant one. Maybe writers just need editors.

  We met in Chicago, where I was promoting my book Bite: A New York Restaurant Strategy in 1972. Bite was ahead of its time, too—unbridled foodiness was not yet the epidemic that it would become, and pitifully few copies were sold. But serious restaurant criticism, which barely existed when I took my first bite for Clay Felker, was growing more common.

  Producers of a local television news show had asked me to review three Chicago restaurants and report my findings on the air—a nice little chance to boost my book. I wanted company for my reviewing meals—to taste more dishes—and I didn’t know many people in Chicago. I decided to invite the editor of Playboy to lunch. New York’s impact was so powerful even this far into the hinterlands that I felt I could invite anyone I didn’t
know to lunch and they might be curious enough to accept. Playboy top gun Arthur Kretchmer demurred, didn’t have a jacket in the office that day, or so he said, and he suggested I take Murray Fisher instead. Murray Fisher. Not an auspicious name. He would look like an accountant or a copy editor, as if he never saw daylight. I didn’t expect anyone that handsome, very tall and slim, with the mane of a lion. Fisher—a brilliant editor, as he told me himself in our first fifteen minutes of breathing the same air—loved food and always had a jacket. That day it was sky blue.

  All I remember about that lunch at the top of some Chicago skyscraper is that it was the sexiest and most intimate conversation I’d ever had . . . sexier and more intimate than a lot of the sex I’d had.

  Fisher was full of himself, cocky and funny, and challenging and smart, and, yes, married, to a young and beautiful wife. Oh well, I was married, too. That needn’t stand between two lusty adults and a bed, I believed. Murray had strong opinions about everything and he wasn’t one to dillydally long with small talk. One spoonful of gazpacho and we were talking about . . . sex and love and infidelity. In response to his cutting probe, I was spilling my deepest anxieties. I admitted I was feeling more and more abandoned by Don and thought that I should be looking for a real connection in case my marriage was finished. Murray was in love with his wife and didn’t believe in playing around, he said. He was a missionary’s son and was perfumed with an air of righteousness. He held my hand as he said it and electric shocks went up my arm.