A Writer's Life (19 page)

His son J.Z. (for Joseph Zol) grew up in New Harmony, Indiana, where he was flying solo in his own plane at sixteen. Following his graduation from Indiana University in 1969, he moved to the Caribbean island of Jamaica, where in the early 1970s he completed a development project along the six-mile beachfront of Negril. In 1973, during a prolonged stay in New York, and while ambling along Sixty-third Street one day, he noticed the rental sign on Frank Catalano's warehouse and telephoned the leasing agent. After receiving permission to inspect the premises, he detected a not unpleasant equestrian fragrance rising through the dank and hollow interior of the building, and he observed the sheen that had been formed by horses' bodies rubbing along the wooden sides of the freight elevator that carried him from floor to floor. He was charmed by the place. And since he could obtain possession of it for an initial sum of $65,000, plus an annual rent of $20,000 to Catalano that guaranteed a long lease and a renewal agreement—and since J. Z. Morris also had no pressing financial problems at the time—he assumed control over the property in a leisurely manner, making little use of it for the next two and a half years except when parking his Rolls-Royce behind the paneled doors of Catalano's onetime garage on the ground floor.

In 1976, J. Z. Morris hired a construction crew at a cost of about $700,000 to gut the interior of the property and make the upper three floors rentable as offices or studio apartments. He sublet the lower two floors and basement to a restaurant partnership for an annual sum of
$46,000; the partners had the intention of transforming it into an elegant Art Deco dining duplex they would call Le Premier. The restaurant partnership was also committed to spending an additional $1.5 million on reconstruction, renovation, and the removal of the freight elevator, which it would subsequently replace with a kaleidoscopic brass-railed staircase that would connect the upper and lower dining areas. The main dining room on ground level—once having borne the weight of trucks and horses—would eventually become resplendent with polished mahogany floors, and the room would be enclosed with salmon-colored walls and a five-tiered ceiling emitting soft beams of pinkish light. Delicate lace curtains embroidered with peacocks would cover the large front window that faced the sidewalk—a window as wide as the paneled doors it had replaced—and the tables would be surrounded by pearl gray suede-covered chairs and banquettes. An antique hand-carved bar imported from Paris would be positioned along the eastern wall behind the laced peacocks, while other walls would be adorned by female figures posed coquettishly within stained-glass Art Deco mirrors.

Upstairs, the theme would be replicated, with Art Deco pendant lights hanging from the ceiling, and the walls decorated with murals including one showing a loose-gowned eighteenth-century woman frolicking in the woods with a satyr and other mythical creatures of obviously lecherous intentions. There would be fewer tables upstairs than on the floor below because the second floor was to function as a kind of club, with dues-paying diners having access not only to more privacy but also to a small room in which they could play backgammon or cards, and that would contain humidified lockers in which members could store their cigars and smoke them in the second floor's piano bar.

After the freight elevator had been removed, J. Z. Morris was obliged to install an enclosed staircase along the western edge of the building, to be used by his tenants who were renting space on either the third, fourth, or fifth floors. He himself temporarily moved into the fifth floor, establishing a small office and a pied-à-terre, and decorating it in a style that unavoidably drew attention from many of his Sixty-third Street neighbors. A delivery truck arrived one afternoon carrying a glass cockpit and the wingless silver fuselage of a World War II naval fighter plane that he had purchased from a salvage company in Maine with the idea of utilizing the truncated plane as a combination objet d'art and telephone booth in his office. Among the observers who stood watching along the sidewalk as the fuselage was hauled up by cable along the front of the building to the roof, from which it was lowered through a large hole onto the fifth floor, was a beautiful young Chinese woman who decided that she now had a
neighbor who was sufficiently eccentric and financially well-off to justify her interest.

Her name was Jackie Ho. She occupied a penthouse apartment in a modern building a few doors east of the warehouse. She was a slender, athletic woman of twenty-six who spent two hours of every afternoon in an East Side gym when she was not spending similar amounts of time in a gym in Hong Kong. She regularly traveled back and forth between the two cities. She had been born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a Chinese family from Canton, and from her hillside home in Hong Kong, overlooking the harbor, she was within walking distance of her rental properties, from which she earned a hefty income. When she was not in Hong Kong or New York, she often indulged her passion for skiing and the après-ski life—in Austria, Switzerland, and Chile—in the company of such men as the son of a leading German industrialist, a jet-setting French financier, and King Hussein of Jordan. An occasional dinner companion of hers prior to her dating J. Z. Morris was the onetime vice president of the United States, Spiro T. Agnew, who often visited Asia as a business consultant after leaving office. She had dined in New York with Agnew at La Grenouille on the evening before she had seen Morris standing on the sidewalk with the truck men as they unloaded the fuselage. Jackie Ho was subsequently introduced to J. Z. Morris at a cocktail party held in the Sixty-third Street apartment of an Argentine woman who helped run Valentino's shop on Fifth Avenue, where Jackie bought her dresses. Two years later, in 1979, Jackie Ho and J. Z. Morris were married. At the same time, since he continued to conduct most of his business from Sarasota, Jackie Ho became his rent collector and manager for the building at 206 East 63rd, where, should anyone be tardy with the rent, she would react with the cantankerous temperament for which Cantonese women are renowned and dreaded.

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.