Duncan Hines (15 page)

On 11 August, Hines spent the night at the Deshler-Wallick Hotel in Columbus, Ohio,
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and that evening he once again dined at the Maramor restaurant, consuming—but perhaps not completely enjoying—a dish of broiled calf liver with bacon, celery, and almonds supreme.
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Eleven days later (22-23 August) Hines lodged at the Commodore Perry Hotel in Toledo, Ohio,
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and dined on chopped livers in Zimmerman's Restaurant.
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He also stopped in Grace E. Smith's Restaurant and Cafeteria to eat the special of the day.
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Shortly after noon
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on 6 September 1938, Florence Hines died of cancer in their Cornell Avenue apartment, her husband at her side. Funeral services were held on 8 September, and she was buried in Chicago.
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Two days later Hines returned to Bowling Green and spent two weeks with his brother and sister.
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While Hines was mourning the loss of Florence, events were taking shape elsewhere that shortly defined the rest of his future. A few weeks before Florence's death, Hines made a quick trip to the Northeast to check on some dining recommendations. While in Madison, Connecticut, a little town on the Connecticut shore, he dropped in on a “dinner detective” friend of his who just happened to be entertaining another friend, Ernie Pyle, the noted correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers. They took Hines to one of their favorite restaurants and suggested he order a lobster dish, one that came to the table bathed in butter. When his meal was brought to him, the two held their breath and waited for the verdict as he put a sizable portion of the shellfish into his mouth. Hines looked off into space for a long, pensive moment. Finally, he turned to them and nodded, murmuring softly, “Very good, very good.” Soon afterward, Pyle wrote a column on him. Pyle's syndicated column was widely read during the late 1930s, and Hines's exposure in the journalist's newspaper column was the first time a large segment of the public had been introduced to him
and his interesting line of work. According to Pyle's article, printed 10 September, Hines's home-office during the past year had been humming with activity. Pyle reported he now employed three to five women in his Chicago apartment, all of them answering his ocean of mail as well as the telephone calls. Pyle also observed he had become something of a “messiah” to travelers across the country, and his “little red book” was their road map and protector from harm. Some of these travelers wrote him every day about new restaurants to include in his next edition. Hines told Pyle that one man once wrote him six letters in one day. When Pyle asked Hines how many meals he sat down to daily, Hines said as many as six, although he added that he did not consume every last morsel on his plate. Rather, Hines said, he just picked at the meal, testing its worthiness or non-worthiness before paying his bill and departing for the next restaurant on his list. He told Pyle he ate only one real “whopper” of a meal each day. This led Pyle to ask him if making a profession out of his hobby did not spoil the personal pleasure of eating. Hines said it did not, because he did not overeat.
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Pyle's column stirred great interest among the public. Soon Hines's secretaries were inundated with requests for their employer's book and information about Hines himself.

After Florence's death, Hines returned to Chicago and threw himself into his work in an effort to forget his misfortune.
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He spent most of his time investigating potential recommendations for his two guidebooks. In late November, on the day before Thanksgiving, Hines drove for six hours through a blizzard from Chicago to Bowling Green to join his family for the holidays. That weekend he and his brother, Porter, went quail hunting in the Warren County woods. The following Monday, however, he resumed his life on the road. He drove to the Ranch Hotel in Stratford, Missouri, to see if it was worthy of inclusion in
Lodging for a Night
On Tuesday, Hines was off to Tulsa, Oklahoma to see the owner of Dolores' Sandwich Shop, a tea room one of his correspondents had recommended. On Wednesday he traveled to the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, area to check on a number of recommendations. Such was the life of Duncan Hines. He got up in
the morning and put his pants on like everyone else. He had nearly forgotten an interview he had sat for in May and had no notion it would ultimately change his life. In fact, he had no inkling of the good fortune he was about to reap.

When Hines had been in Philadelphia in May, he stopped by the offices of the
Saturday Evening Post
to visit his friend Wesley Stout, the magazine's editor. Stout thought his magazine's readers would be greatly interested in reading about Hines and his unusual but worthwhile business. So he commissioned a journalist, Milton MacKaye, who often wrote articles for the
Post
, to write a feature piece on Hines.
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Before the month was over, MacKaye sat down with Hines in his Chicago apartment for an extensive interview, one which lasted for several days. As is the nature of magazine articles, there was a long delay between interview and publication, and MacKaye's article had by this time practically vanished from Hines's memory.

During the last week of November Hines received word the
Saturday Evening Post
issue which featured the article on him was about to be published. He complained to his secretary, Ms. I. A. Bench, “I do not know why the
SE Post
did not let me see [a] proof of [the] article. I gave MacKaye enough material for half dozen stories. So I do not know what they are printing.”
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Three days later he found out. On 30 November, the 3 December 1938 edition of the
Saturday Evening Post
article hit America's newsstands. Inside its pages appeared a lengthy article of how Duncan Hines's little hobby of visiting good restaurants had mushroomed into an annual guidebook now very much in demand by the reading and traveling public. As soon as the magazine appeared on newsstands, Hines bought several copies so his friends and family could read the article.
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On the same day the article was being devoured by the
Posts
readers, Hines received a telegram from M. Lincoln Schuster of Simon and Schuster, which read:

New York City Nov. 30, 1938 Duncan Hines 5494 Cornell Ave. Chicago Congratulations on Saturday Evening Post article. All of us here doubly interested because we have been making
independent researches for years toward an american eating guide book. If you are interested in making a deal with an established publishing house like ours for distribution and promotion would like to explore possibilities with you. We have done a number of books in this field including complete wine book by Bates and Schoonmaker and Ida Bailey Allen's Cooking with Wines and Spirits. When will you be in New York or could you see Mr. Simon in Chicago later in December otherwise suggest we discuss this further by mail. M. Lincoln Schuster Simon and Schuster
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Hines scribbled on the telegram a note to his secretary, “Have written him. D. H.” A meeting between the two men was arranged for January 1939, but for one reason or another, they never met. Schuster's partner, Richard Simon, also tried to acquire Hines as a client. But to no avail. Hines had good reasons to shy away from large publishers, despite the advantages they possessed in advertising and distribution. In a letter to his New York agent for national book distribution, Frank M. Watts, an employee of the New York book-publishing firm, W. W. Norton & Co., Hines explained why he was reluctant to have publishers take over his business. “I receive letters from publishers from time to time,” Hines confided to Watts, “all offering to take over the publishing of my books, but the one thing that they do not understand is that the book has to be revised all the time and [do not realize] the enormous cost [it entails]…. [I]f I turn[ed] the book over to someone on a royalty basis I would go broke in a hurry…. If I could turn the books over to someone under some arrangements whereby the cost of all this detail work would be paid, and then net me a sufficient royalty, I might consider it.”
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For the present, he believed his best interest was to leave things as they were. More than a decade passed before he would find a suitable business arrangement.

Book publishers knocking on Hines's door was only the beginning. For Duncan Hines the
Saturday Evening Post
article was his life's seminal event. Overnight he was transformed from a small-time book-publisher into America's most authoritative voice on the best places to eat. In a very short time he was an American celebrity. He was in demand to give talks and make appearances before audiences of all kinds. The public's regard for him and what he had to say was so high that his sphere of influence eventually extended well beyond recommending restaurants. The only explanation that can account for the phenomenon of his sudden popularity and his instant—almost eager—acceptance by the public is that he was the right man in the right place at the right time. Americans were ready for a Duncan Hines, and he was ready for them.

Hines seized the sudden respect the public bequeathed to him and quickly turned it to his advantage. In an era of social reforms, he would also become a social reformer, one who acted on behalf of the dining public. At age fifty-eight he had a great career ahead of him, and his only regret was that Florence was not there to share
it with him. Nevertheless, this was his moment, and he made the most of it.

Despite the attention he suddenly received, his personal life changed little. Success did not go to his head. Hines remained level-headed about his transformation from common to famous citizen. For the next few months he continued working out of his Chicago apartment-office. The cult of celebrity, however, did affect his book publishing business—for the better. Even before the
Post
article hit the newsstands, he had been forced to hire three and sometimes five secretaries to help him with the avalanche of mail that daily greeted his mailbox.
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When Milton MacKaye interviewed him, he described his Cornell Avenue apartment as “a houseful of antique furniture.” Florence had been the household's collector, but circumstances had forced him to displace some of her antiques to make way for desks, typewriters, filing cabinets, and other needed office furniture. By late 1938 his incoming correspondence averaged more than “400 letters and cards a week,” and he made sure his employees answered every piece. When not on the road inspecting new restaurants, Hines routinely spent his time answering his mail, preparing new editions of his two guidebooks, as well as working on a new publication, a cookbook.

Even before the appearance of the
Saturday Evening Post
article, Hines was not always able to travel about the country with complete anonymity. After the publication of
Adventures in Good Eating
s second edition, some restaurants he had previously listed anticipated another visit. “Now that he has a national reputation among food people,” MacKaye wrote in his
Post
article, Hines's practice of dropping in on kitchens “takes some strength of character, for if it were known that he was dining at any given place, you may be sure that his service and food would be attended to personally.”
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Despite this handicap, Hines regularly investigated potential new guidebook entries. When not engaged in his search, Hines re-inspected previous entries. If he noticed in his mail a pattern of complaints, he subsequently investigated; if he found his worst suspicions confirmed, he deleted the entry from
the guidebook's next edition—usually forever, unless he received information to warrant it another chance, (e.g., new owners).

One of the myths Duncan Hines deliberately perpetuated about himself over the years was that he might at any moment enter a restaurant's kitchen through the back door and inspect it before he dined. According to Hines, he had a technique he claimed could ferret out any ill-omened restaurant, particularly if it was imaginatively unclean. This method of separating good restaurants from bad, if practiced at all, was probably honed during the 1920s, when he and Florence first traversed across America's few paved roads. As previously stated, roadside restaurants of that era were usually unsanitary affairs, so they had to watch where—and what—they ate. Nevertheless, well into the mid-1950s, Hines had Americans believing it was his regular practice to park his automobile outside a potential restaurant and head for the back door. “First I sneak around to the back to see what the garbage situation looks like,” said Hines in a typical interview. “If that's bad, I stick my nose in the kitchen,” perhaps detecting unpleasant odors of food served two days earlier. “If I smell rancid grease, then I back out. I know it must be one of those” restaurants “where if you get anything to eat after the cockroaches are finished, you're lucky.”
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Of these back door excursions, Hines said he often encountered some really revolting sights, such as the time he slipped through the rear entrance of one restaurant and discovered “the family cat sleeping on the bread dough.”
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This story was one Hines told repeatedly over the years. The image of him lurking around the back doors of restaurants, discovering public hellholes serving unsanitary food too dreadful to contemplate, created an image of Hines that remained embedded in the American consciousness for more than two decades.

Although it will never be determined if Duncan Hines visited many restaurants via the back door, it really did not matter. He frequently wrote of doing it, he always said he did it, and he made enough personal restaurant inspections to make the public and restaurant owners think he did it. In addition, he periodically had himself photographed inspecting restaurant kitchens, and these
pictures invariably were printed in scores of magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements to farther the image he intended to create. Everyone believed he did it, and that was enough for Hines. Perception was reality. Every restaurant was on notice. Duncan Hines, they feared, might step through the back door at any moment. He might catch them with a dirty kitchen and spoil their potential chance to have an endless stream of customers via his guidebook. It was a great system for cleaning up restaurant kitchens throughout America, and it no doubt afforded Hines many private cackles.