Authors: Nora Ephron
Inside the
Palm Beach Social Pictorial
are advertisements (“Dress up your diamond bracelet”), columns and pictures. The pictures show the people of Palm Beach eating lunch, wearing diamonds in the daytime, eating dinner, attending charity functions, and wearing party clothes. Most of the people are old, except that some of the women have young husbands. It is apparently all right to have a young husband if you are an old woman in Palm Beach, but not vice versa; in fact, the vice versa is one of the few things the columnists in the
Social Pictorial
get really upset about. Here, for instance, is columnist Doris Lilly writing about the guests at a recent party she attended: “Bill Carter (now U.N. ambassador to U.N.I.C.E.F.) proved he really does love children by bringing his latest airline hostess.” And here from another columnist, Maria Durell Stone, is another guest list: “Then there were the Enrique Rousseaus, she’s Lilly Pulitzer, and even Lilly’s ex, Peter, was there with, well, as someone said, ‘I don’t think it’s his daughter but she just might be.’ ” Every so often, the
Pictorial
prints pictures of people they describe as members of Palm Beach’s Younger Set; they all look to be in their mid-forties.
There are two types of columnists who write for the
Pictorial
—locals, and correspondents from elsewhere. There are two advantages to being a correspondent from elsewhere: You don’t have to spend the winter in Palm Beach, and you get a lofty title on the masthead. Wally Cedar, who writes from Beverly Hills and Acapulco, is the
Pictorial
’s International Editor, and Liz Smith, who writes from New York, is the National Editor. With one exception—and I’ll get to her in a minute: she’s Maria Durell Stone—the local columnists in the
Pictorial
have tended to be relentlessly cheerful women whose only quibbles about life in Palm Beach have to do with things like the inefficiency of the streetlights on Worth Avenue. Cicely Dawson, who owns the
Pictorial
along with
her husband Ed, whom she always refers to as “our better half,” writes a goings-on-about-town column in which she manages to summon unending enthusiasm and exclamation points for boutiques, galleries, parties, and new savings banks in town. “Congratulations to Nan and James Egan of the James Beauty Salon on their recent twenty-fifth anniversary,” Dawson once wrote. “No client would guess from the cheerful attitude of this wonderful couple what hardship they have had these past few months. After an illness-free life, James was diagnosed as having chronic kidney failure last December. Oh that Palm Beach County had an Artificial Kidney Center!… because that’s what James needs.”
In all fairness, Mrs. Dawson is almost a grouch in comparison to Leone “Call Me the Pollyanna of Palm Beach” King, who until her retirement in 1973 could not find enough good things to say about the place. “Where else,” Mrs. King once asked in a long series of rhetorical questions, “could you find families offering living quarters to people of low incomes, without at least making some sort of charge?… Where could you find friends with splendid flower gardens leaving a message with their gardeners to send certain people bouquets during the winter while they are off on a trip around the world? Where could you find big bags of fruit from a Palm Beach orange grove on your doorstep at regular intervals?… Don’t let fabulously rich people throw you. They are just the same as anyone else except that they can do what they jolly well please when they jolly well please. They have likes and dislikes, aches and pains, problems. They are just people.”
Maria Durell Stone has left the
Palm Beach Social Pictorial
—she has been stolen away by the West Palm Beach daily paper—but her two years on the weekly coincided, and not coincidentally either, with what I think of as the
Pictorial
’s Golden Era, so I cannot leave her out of this. Mrs. Stone is a Latin-looking lady with a tremendous
amount of jet-black hair who is divorced from architect Edward Durell Stone and has taken not one but two of his names along with her. She began writing for the
Pictorial
three years ago, and no one writing in any of the Palm Beach publications comes near her gift for telling it like it is. “I’ve done nothing but praise the Poinciana Club since it opened,” she wrote last year, “but being a critic means that every now and then one must speak the truth and I am sorry to say it, but Bavarian Night there was a disaster.”
Mrs. Stone’s main problem in life—and the theme of her column too—had to do with being a single woman in a place where there are few eligible men. There are a lot of us with this problem, God knows, but she managed to be more in touch with it than anyone I know. Not a column passed without a pointed remark to remind the reader that this Mrs. Stone was looking for a Roman spring. “I met Vassili Lambrinos this week and he’s divine,” she wrote one week. “Dorothy Dodson, petite, refreshing and vivacious, gave a luncheon for him and I got to know him better—unfortunately not as much as I would like to, but what’s a poor bachelor girl to do?” Another week, Mrs. Stone went to a charity auction: “There were numerous items to bid on and I did covet that stateroom for two on the S.S.
France
, but as luck would have it, someone else got it. I wouldn’t have known who to take with me anyway, so it’s probably just as well.” Age was no barrier: “One of the best things of the evening,” she wrote of the Boys’ Club Dinner, “was the Boys’ Club Chorus, which consisted of adorable little boys of unfortunate circumstances who sang many lively numbers at the top of their divine adolescent voices. It was heartwarming to hear.” Apparently, Mrs. Stone’s subtlety was not lost on her readers: “Stanton Griffis, that amazing ex-ambassador who sat next to me at the Salvation Army luncheon the other day, told me that if I really wanted to get the right man, I should put an ad in my column saying,
‘Wanted: Intelligent, handsome, lean, tall, romantic type with kindness and money.’ Well, now that I’ve said it, let’s see if my octogenarian friend is right.”
From time to time, something sneaks into the
Pictorial
that has to do with the outside world, and when it does, it is usually in Liz Smith’s column. Miss Smith writes for the publication as if she were addressing a group of—well, a group of people who winter in Palm Beach. She interrupts her column of easygoing gossip and quotes to bring her readers little chautauquas; last year’s were about Richard Nixon (“Hope all you people who couldn’t stomach poor old Hubert are happy these days,” one of them concluded) and this year’s are about oil and the Middle East. (“So here are the most fascinating and frightening statistics I’ve read recently, from
The New Republic
. You remember
The New Republic
—it’s liberal, left, and riddled with integrity, but even so, don’t ignore the statistics.”)
The rich are different from you and me; we all know that even if some of the people in Palm Beach don’t. But it is impossible to read the
Social Pictorial
without suspecting that the rich in Palm Beach are even more different. One of my friends tells me that Palm Beach used to be a rather nice place and that now it’s become a parody of itself; I don’t know if she’s right, but if she is, the
Social Pictorial
reflects this perfectly. If there were more communities like it, I don’t think I would find the
Palm Beach Social Pictorial
so amusing. But there aren’t, so I do.
The
Palm Beach Social Pictorial
, P.O. Box 591, Palm Beach, Florida. By subscription $10 a year.
May, 1975
It is generally agreed among the people who have any perspective on it at all—and there are only a handful who do—that the entire civic scandal of Richard Collin and the mysterious spaghetti sauce recipe could only have happened in New Orleans—which was, in fact, where it did happen—and for fairly obvious reasons. For one thing, New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.) For another, people in New Orleans really care about food, care about it passionately, can spend hours arguing over whether Antoine’s is better than Galatoire’s or the other way around. What sets the people of New Orleans apart from the people of San Francisco in this respect is that in New Orleans, there is basically nothing to do but eat and then argue about it.
All of which should have made Richard Collin a welcome addition to the New Orleans food scene. Richard Collin is a restaurant critic. He is New Orlean’s first and only serious restaurant critic. A professor of American history at the University of New Orleans, Collin, forty-three, began his career in food in 1970 as the author
of
The New Orleans Underground Gourmet
(Simon and Schuster). A few months after its publication he was hired by the
New Orleans States-Item
to write a weekly restaurant column. In it, Collin employs an extremely elaborate system of stars and dots and parentheses and
X
’s which takes over five column-inches of space to explain each week. In addition, he uses an expression he coined to describe things he particularly loves; he calls them platonic dishes. “This is my own personal accolade,” Collin once explained. “The term is derived from Plato’s
Republic
. It simply means the best imaginable realization of a particular dish.” Collin’s style of criticism can best be described as hyperbolic; it can also be described as self-important and longwinded. But he works hard, and his guidebook is considered as reliable as any city restaurant guide in the country.
In New Orleans, however, the question of whether Collin is reliable is not the point. The point is that he is critical—and in public. Arguing privately about the merits of various restaurants is one thing, but criticizing them publicly runs completely counter to the local spirit of boosterism. To make matters worse, Collin is not even from New Orleans; he is from Philadelphia and he is seen as an outsider who has stumbled onto a gold mine at the expense of local merchants. So when the episode of the spaghetti sauce recipe and the two thousand dollars surfaced a few months ago, the city fathers fell upon it as an excuse to ask the
States-Item
to investigate Collin. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
The position of restaurant critic is a new slot at most newspapers; nonetheless, the job has a tradition and a set of ethics. The classic American restaurant critic is rarely photographed, makes reservations under a pseudonym, cannot accept free meals, and never reveals his identity to a proprietor. Some restaurant critics have gone to extraordinary lengths to preserve their anonymity;
last year, for example, Jack Shelton of
San Francisco
magazine was subpoenaed to testify in a local trial, and he appeared wearing a mask.
Prior to the publication of his book, Richard Collin followed traditional practices; in any case, it would have done him no good to reveal himself, since his name meant nothing. But the success of the book, the newspaper column (which ran a sketch of Collin alongside his by-line) and subsequent public appearances made Collin’s face and name well-known. By 1973, when the revised edition of
The Underground Gourmet
was published, Collin had moved into a slightly revisionist phase of behavior. He continued to pay for his meals, but he admitted that from time to time a restaurateur managed to force a free one on him. He continued to reserve under a pseudonym, but it became increasingly difficult to keep from being recognized. He began to metamorphose into a role he thought of as a kindly godfather, but which might more correctly be defined as participatory journalist. He became a close friend of Warren Le Ruth, whose restaurant, Le Ruth’s, received Collin’s highest rating: four stars and ten platonic dishes. He gave advice to owners and to chefs. He seemed to regard himself as an impresario who was going to bring to New Orleans cuisine the acclaim it deserved. “I frequently introduce myself
after
the check has been paid,” he wrote, “especially in smaller restaurants that are doing well and that deserve to be encouraged. I also notify restaurants in advance when a favorable review is to appear in the Saturday paper so that the restaurant does not run out of food by six or seven in the evening, as has happened when the pending review was kept a secret. For this edition I have not been quite as anonymous as I was for the first edition. Many restaurateurs saw me on television or met me at speaking engagements around town. However, known or unknown, distant or friendly, I have continued to base my evaluations
solely on the genuine merits of the food restaurants serve. I enjoy being a restaurant critic too much to allow my integrity to be compromised.”
The trouble began in April, 1973, with what looked—to Richard Collin, at least—like a pure case of civic duty. Turci’s Original Italian Restaurant was about to close. Turci’s was a typical grubby neighborhood restaurant on Poydras Street in downtown New Orleans; it had sluggish service but a platonic spaghetti sauce. It also had a platonic veal parmigiana, but the important thing was the spaghetti sauce: it had a rich, tomatoey, almost burned flavor, and it was packed with meatballs, mushrooms and chicken. Collin had given the restaurant three stars and, with his customary enthusiasm, announced that Turci’s cooking was “unsurpassed in New Orleans or in Italy itself.” But times got hard for Turci’s, the neighborhood changed, and Rose Turci Serwich, the daughter of the original owners, decided she would have to shut down. Collin heard the news and wrote a column suggesting that someone raise the money to move Turci’s to a better location and save the restaurant.
A New Orleans businessman named Joe Bernstein read the article. Along with two partners, he had just bought a building on Magazine Street and was looking for a ground-floor tenant. Bernstein called one of his partners, Ben C. Toledano, who occasionally wrote book reviews for the
States-Item
and knew Collin; Toledano called Collin and asked him to serve as intermediary in arranging the purchase of Turci’s. “It was an uncomfortable position,” Collin recalled recently, “but it was part of my responsibility to the community at large.” Collin went ahead and arranged for Turci’s to sell its name and good will for a reported ten thousand dollars and for Mrs. Serwich to sign an employment contract. A year later, the new Turci’s opened. It was beautiful. It was crowded.
It was fashionable. And it was terrible. Everyone knew it—Joe Bernstein knew it and Mrs. Serwich knew it. Both of them were on the phone to Richard Collin to complain about restaurant personnel. Mrs. Serwich hated the chef. Mrs. Serwich had objections to the manager. Joe Bernstein was going crazy because of the tension between Mrs. Serwich and the chef and Mrs. Serwich and the manager. But most of all, there was the problem of the spaghetti sauce. “I couldn’t go to a cocktail party or go out on the street without someone telling me the sauce just wasn’t the same,” Joe Bernstein recalled. “I became frantic.” The problem with the spaghetti sauce was really a very simple one: there was no recipe for it, and there never had been. The old Turci’s spaghetti sauce had been a concoction made of tomato paste and leftovers. The new Turci’s had no leftovers, owing to a streamlined kitchen and cost accounting; the new chef had no idea what to do under the circumstances. In the midst of all this, Richard Collin dropped in to Turci’s for dinner.