Eating (12 page)

From my flat on Tenth Street, I liked to walk a mile or so downtown to the old Washington Market, which was razed by 1973 to make way for the World Trade Center. There are still a few old-style public markets in New York’s ethnic neighborhoods, where merchants hire stalls to display their meat, poultry, produce, and grocery items, and from May to October the green markets throughout the city are a blessing, but the Washington Market, beneath a vast skylit roof bounded by Fulton, Vesey, and Washington Streets, barely a mile north of the tip of Manhattan, was special, for it had been established before the Revolution on land donated by Trinity Church and still conveyed a sense of those times. Here you could feel immersed in New York’s living past as you
wandered from booth to booth, tended by merchants with plump red faces in long white coats and straw boaters beside shambles offering racks of feathered game, fine poultry, sides of beef, whole lambs and piglets, while other stalls featured crates of eggs, tubs of yellow butter, neatly piled eggplants and cabbages and oysters on ice, one of which poisoned me so that I could not look at another for a decade.

I remember, as in a dream, a long-lost restaurant on Cedar Street, a few blocks north of the market, which must have supplied the game birds featured on its menu, including the cold Scotch grouse that I ordered at a solitary lunch some fifty years ago. The bird was boned and stuffed with foie gras and accompanied by a sprightly juniper-infused game sauce, with a side of pommes soufflées on a linen napkin in a battered silver dish. But a few years later, when I happened to be downtown, the restaurant had vanished, leaving not a trace. Even now when I find myself on lower Broadway I think of it and wonder if that unforgettable restaurant, with its sawdust floors and worn wooden tabletops, may have been only a dream.

For underpaid young editors in those days, there were a dozen or so inexpensive French restaurants in Manhattan with blurred menus in light-blue ink run off on a ditto machine, offering céléri rémoulade, moules marinière, pêté maison, maquerau au vin blanc, escargots, blanquette de veau, coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon, entrecôte aux pommes soufflées or frites, and
so on, of which the Fleur de Lis on the Upper West Side was typical. Here two could spend a long evening, with a carafe of wine, for under ten dollars. For grand occasions there was Chambord, on Third Avenue, with its trolley of hors d’oeuvres, its soufflés, and its chocolate truffles to take as you left. Here you could spend forty dollars for dinner for two with a decent claret. When Chambord disappeared to make way for what would become the Random House Building, Roger Chauveron, the owner, opened a place around the corner in his own name, which lasted a few years, until it, too, was displaced, by the new Citicorp Building. One by one, Manhattan’s other high-style so-called Continental restaurants followed Chauveron into oblivion, including the very chic Colony. It was there one night that I witnessed an old woman in blue sneakers, who had been canvassing the other diners for Richard Nixon earlier in the evening, pass out and apparently die at her table. Whereupon four waiters swiftly appeared, each lifting a leg of her chair tilted slightly back so that she would not slide off, and carried her out of sight on this improvised palanquin, while the surviving patrons, having glanced at this memento mori, returned to their pheasants and quenelles de brochet. Eventually, even the great Le Pavillon, and finally its offspring, La Côte Basque, gave up, as a wave of culinary fads, led by
la nouvelle cuisine,
supplanted these monuments to Escoffier and Monsieur Point.

The business of book publishing is done mainly in
restaurants, at lunch and occasionally at dinner. Staff meetings are held, calls are made, and paperwork is shuffled in the office. Lunch and dinner reservations are made there, but the real work is performed with knife and fork. It was, for example, over lunch in 1925 at “21,” then an elegant speakeasy on East Fifty-second Street in New York, and still a high-testosterone hangout for burnished Wall Street ninjas, male and female, that Bennett Cerf, a young vice president at the firm of Liveright and Company, offered to buy from the brilliant but wildly improvident Horace Liveright the Modern Library, which provided the stability on which the company and its staff depended. Bennett had bought his vice presidency with an investment of twenty-five thousand dollars in the chaotic firm, and now, having learned the business, wanted his own company. Liveright was desperate to repay money he had borrowed from his father-in-law, whose daughter he wanted to divorce. The deal was made over lunch, and Random House was launched, with Bennett and his friend Donald Klopfer as partners and the Modern Library as its cash cow.

One evening in the 1980s at “21,” a fellow Random House editor and I were awaiting Roy Cohn, a regular at that place, who was dying of AIDS and wanted to publish his memoirs while he still had time. Like so
many others, I had dreaded and despised Cohn for his cruel red-baiting as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel. Later, when I got to know him, I found myself surprisingly at ease with him. Roy, I discovered, was born without a conscience, a Shakespearean birth defect that he shared with Edmund and Iago, for whose frailty S. T. Coleridge invented the exquisite term “motiveless malignity.” Roy believed in nothing and had no concept of truth. His condition may explain but hardly excuses his atrocious behavior, or redeems the harm he did to his country and the countless people he had gratuitously hurt as McCarthy’s chief counsel. I was fascinated by him as a moral grotesque like Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, the fictional twin of Karl Rove. After a lifetime in the book business, I tend to see people as fictional characters, as Humpty Dumpty, Dr. Casaubon, Emma Bovary, Captain Ahab: a professional deformation. For me, Roy exemplified star-quality wickedness. It was Norman Mailer, Roy’s Provincetown neighbor, who introduced me to him. I believe that Norman saw in Roy possibilities like those he had seen in Gary Gilmore, the heartless killer who with a slight moral adjustment might have been the promising young man next door rather than the murderer of
The Executioner’s Song.
Norman did not pursue this opportunity with Roy, a neighbor and friend.

That Roy might write a valuable memoir was inconceivable. But with strong editorial help, perhaps something could be salvaged from the helter-skelter
manuscript pages he had shown me. To reject out of hand his wish to write a book would have been irresponsible. Roy knew Joseph McCarthy and his sinister retinue as no one else did. Moreover, in person Roy was nothing like the dough-faced consigliere with the hooded eyes whispering into McCarthy’s ear at the Committee’s televised hearings. To my surprise, I had come to like him and hoped that with the help of an editor, Cohn might re-create his complex character as the narrator of his own life: a very long shot, but worth a try, and he was paying for dinner.

As we discussed the manuscript, Roy told me that he had been raised as a New Deal liberal Democrat by his father, a politically connected New York judge. In 1944, he campaigned for FDR on West Seventy-second Street, the beating heart of New York’s liberal Upper West Side. He retained his Democratic Party affiliation throughout his life. His conversion to anti-Communism, he told me, came when, as a twenty-four-year-old assistant U.S. attorney, he joined the prosecution of the atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and was won over by the fervent young FBI agents assigned to the trial. A few days later, when I asked Roy how seriously he took the threat of Communist subversion, he said off handedly, as an actor might dismiss his screen self as just a job, “Communism never worried me. It was Joe’s thing.” To me Roy never displayed strong political feelings of any kind. But the story of his conversion to anti-Communism by the young agents to whom he was attracted seems plausible.
Thus he became a hero of the Republican right and used these connections to shape his career. Had the opportunity arisen, he could as easily have become a Stalinist.

Roy told me that U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol, the chief prosecutor of the Rosenberg case, was “an idiot” and that he himself was alone responsible for the major government strategy which led to the conviction and execution of the couple. This strategy included a secret arrangement which he claimed to have negotiated with Joe Rauh, a famous liberal lawyer, to spare his client, David Greenglass, a Los Alamos machinist, the electric chair. Greenglass agreed to testify—falsely, as he later admitted—that his sister, Ethel, typed her brother’s stolen notes, which Julius then forwarded to the Russians. This clinched the case for the prosecution. There was much potentially important material of this sort in Cohn’s chaotic pages, and I had hoped that we might salvage enough of it to make a book before Roy died. But Roy was obviously dying when we met at “21,” where he ordered his favorite tuna salad, made especially for him but left untouched that evening.

Roy was interesting on Judge Irving Kaufman, who presided at the Rosenberg trial and was Roy’s neighbor on Park Avenue. Every evening during the trial, according to Roy, the judge and he would discuss ex parte the day’s events and plan tomorrow’s courtroom strategy without the presence of the defendants’ counsel. When it came time to sentence the Rosenbergs, the judge, Roy said, asked him whether he should spare Mrs. Rosenberg’s
life, as Pope Pius XII, Albert Einstein, and Pablo Picasso, among many others, had urged, but the judge was unsure and let it be known that he sat for hours in Temple Emmanuel on Fifth Avenue consulting his God on the matter. According to Roy, the closest Kaufman came to the fashionable temple was the phone booth outside, where he discussed Ethel Rosenberg’s fate not with God but with Roy, on the other end of the line, in Boca Raton. It was Roy, by his own account, who settled the matter by reminding the judge that the Rosenbergs were found equally guilty, so Mrs. Rosenberg’s gender should not be a factor, though Roy may have known at the time that Greenglass’s testimony was fraudulent. According to Roy, the judge asked how this would play in the
Times,
whose support he coveted. Roy told him not to worry and Ethel Rosenberg was sentenced to death.

Roy then went on to become McCarthy’s chief counsel, an assignment that Joseph P. Kennedy wanted for his son Bobby. The elder Kennedy had paid McCarthy not to campaign in Massachusetts for the Republican candidate when Jack was running for the Senate in 1952 and felt that Joe owed him and his son a favor. But George Sokolsky, Hearst’s political columnist, wanted Roy for the job, perhaps to show that not all Jews were Communists. With support from Cardinal Spellman and J. Edgar Hoover, according to Roy, Sokolsky convinced McCarthy to choose Cohn. Bobby was furious. He should not have been. Had he become McCarthy’s chief counsel, the Kennedy family would have been ruined
politically. Roy, by preempting Bobby, made Jack’s presidency possible.
*

One morning, in the kitchen of Roy’s unkempt town house, I was pondering a cup of coffee that had turned cold as I waited for Roy to come downstairs to work on the manuscript. A back staircase led directly from the bedrooms to the kitchen. Eventually, Roy emerged wearing a short robe that reached only halfway to his bare knees. “Roy,” I asked, “in your memoir, how do you plan to deal with your homosexuality?” I had found no reference to his sex life in his manuscript, though his preference was well known. In fact, at that very moment his companion, to whom I had been introduced previously, came down from the bedroom, said hello, and left. “Your homosexuality?” I reminded Roy. Roy and I belonged to a generation that had not yet gotten used to the word “gay.” “I’m not homosexual,” he replied, without expression, his watery blue eyes unblinking.

The bland country-club menu at “21” had never appealed to me except,
faute de mieux,
for the “black and blue” hamburger—a half-pound of chopped sirloin blackened on the outside, cool on the inside, steak tartare enclosed in a burnt hamburger crust—served with limp string beans and the restaurant’s own spicy ketchup, tomato paste mixed with mustard, cumin, and who knows what else. That evening I didn’t touch my hamburger. Roy was dying before my eyes. He could hardly lift his fork.

It was now obvious that he would never finish his manuscript. A few days later, I heard that Nancy Reagan had sent him to Walter Reed for experimental treatment with AZT. I never saw him again.

As far as I can recall, Roy never visited me in either Manhattan or Sag Harbor, but we did meet once at a restaurant in East Hampton. The occasion was the birthday of an old aunt, which Roy celebrated each year by inviting his most illustrious friends—politicians, tabloid journalists, judges, and so on—to a luncheon in her honor. But this year Roy was in disgrace. He had been disbarred for cheating a client, and his sickness had been widely rumored. His entourage had abandoned him and he would soon die. I arrived at the restaurant to find a long table set along either side for forty or so guests, with balloons and red, white, and blue favors at each place. But except for Roy himself and the old woman crumpled in her seat at the head of the table, no one had shown up. I was the only guest.

The “black and blue” hamburger that I ordered that night at “21” and couldn’t eat is no longer fashionable, having been preempted by Daniel Boulud’s extravaganza. But it is easy to make at home, and far less expensive.

For my version, you will need a piece of rib eye or fillet, which you may grind at home in a food processor a little at a time, being careful to retain a chunky texture. What you want to achieve is room-temperature steak tartare enclosed in a shell blackened at top and bottom. Mix a few grains of sea salt, some pepper, and a trace of cumin or celery salt with a dash of Worcestershire into the meat. Form the mixture into a ball, placing a sliver of ice in the center. You might also add some celery and/or onion, chopped very fine. Lightly flatten the ball, top and bottom, and lower it carefully onto a well-seasoned, very hot cast-iron skillet or griddle to which you have added a knob of unsalted butter. After a few minutes, turn the burger carefully so that it blackens evenly, top and bottom. Then finish it in a hot oven until the sides are no longer raw and the burger holds together. The ice will keep the inside cool.