A Writer's Life (15 page)

She was employed variously as a hatcheck girl, a clerk in a used-book store, and a pitchwoman selling cosmetics at the Astor Hotel's pharmacy in the Times Square district. She worked in the stamp department of Gimbel's Department Store in Herald Square, and as a waitress in an uptown restaurant on 116th Street and one downtown on Tenth Street. While waitressing at Portofino on Thompson Street at Bleecker in the Village, she fell in love with the owner, a Genoese gentleman named Alfredo Viazzi, who years before, as a waiter on a luxury cruise ship, had cultivated a courtly manner in an effort to impress the better-looking of the widowed women who were traveling alone in first-class accommodations. Elaine and Alfredo Viazzi lived together above the restaurant on the fifth floor of a walk-up apartment building in which the tenants included a Mafia enforcer named Vincent “The Chin” Gigante and his mother, around whom Vincent was invariably dutiful and compliant. Elaine's affair with Alfredo ended bitterly when he became romantically involved with a stage actress, and this is what prompted her to move
uptown in 1963 and, with financial help from a partner she would eventually buy out, acquire the run-down Austro-Hungarian tavern she would rename Elaine's.

In addition to her friends from downtown, Elaine's uptown patrons who helped to launch her restaurant included the editor and writer Nelson Aldrich and the poet Frederick Seidel, both of whom were connected editorially with the New York-based literary magazine
The Paris Review
, a quarterly founded a decade earlier on the Left Bank by George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and other young American writers then living abroad. The quarterly's contributors and supporters who were also in Paris then included the novelists William Styron, Terry Southern, and John Phillips Marquand, the latter being the first lover of a comely debutante who during the early 1950s was a regular visitor to the city—Jackie Bouvier, future wife of John F. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. Marquand told me during the 1980s that when he and Jackie had first made love in a small Left Bank hotel, she had looked up into his eyes and inquired wonderingly, in her whispery little-girl voice, “That's
it?”

The courtesy and respect that Elaine Kaufman showed toward poets and writers in her restaurant—to say nothing of the free after-dinner drinks and the fact that she decorated her restaurant's walls with framed photos of their faces and book jackets, correctly assuming that they would have no objection to eating and drinking in a place where they were surrounded by reminders of themselves—helped to establish Elaine's as a highbrow tavern in a low-rent district where the blasé clientele would hardly bat an eye if on any given night they saw Elaine escorting to a table the Dalai Lama accompanied by a ghostwriter and a representative from the William Morris Agency. It was often close to dawn before she locked her doors, waiting patiently while a few of her regulars finished their nightly backgammon or card game at one of the rear tables. She rarely gambled at cards herself, or bet on sporting events, but she was busily engaged in the stock market, profiting from the wisdom she received from one of the few Wall Streeters who were part of her inner circle. In 1968, five years after opening Elaine's, she had earned enough money from her business and stock investments to purchase the entire four-story apartment building that included her restaurant.

Nicola Spagnolo began working for her during her second year of operation, in the spring of 1964, and he functioned as her headwaiter for the next ten years. He attended to the front tables, where he was on a firstname basis with the regular customers, and he soon knew as well as they did what they liked to eat and drink and how they wanted their food to be seasoned and served. Since dropping out of school at fourteen in his
native village, located between Genoa and the French border, Nicola had followed his male relatives into the realm of restaurant service, which would become his lifelong undertaking. Beginning as a pot washer and apprentice in a local bar and patisserie, he next found seasonal work in the kitchens of resort hotels and inns extending along the beaches from Nice to Marseilles, and in winters he often signed on as a kitchen helper on cruise ships. While employed as a cook's assistant on an Italian merchant marine vessel that was docked in Bayonne, New Jersey, in late November 1956, Nicola decided to jump ship. At the time, he was nearly thirty, a bachelor with no dependents and a carefree disposition. So he slipped away from the crew one night, hailed a taxi into Manhattan, and traveled by subway to the Bronx, where he had the name and address of an Italian compatriot whom he knew would temporarily shelter him and would eventually get him a job in one of the many New York restaurants and hotels that employed illegal aliens in their kitchens.

A year later, still undetected by the American immigration authorities who had been notified about his defection, Spagnolo was a hireling in the kitchen of the St. Regis Hotel on Fifty-fifth Street off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Although he had not yet mastered English, his fluency in French and Spanish as well as Italian meant that he had no difficulty in communicating with the many foreign-born people who worked at the St. Regis and in the other places where he moonlighted during his offduty hours. As he continued each day to ride the subway back and forth to work between the Bronx and Manhattan, and as he enlarged upon his sense of the city through his after-hours strolls and his widening social contacts, he guessed that he was one of several hundred or maybe one of several
thousand
fugitives who earned their keep “off the books” in the kitchens of restaurants or hotels, as well as in the factories of the Garment District and in the construction yards of the city's five boroughs, and at numerous other job sites that were linked to the vast underground economy that flourished in New York.

Nicola was pleased that this situation existed, having no misgivings about its being criminal or mendacious or unfair to dues-paying unionists. From what he had heard from his friends in the Bronx, the margin of profit in the restaurant business was so small, and the operating costs and various risks involved were so high, that if the bosses were to adhere strictly to the law—that is, hire only licensed workers and pay them according to union standards—it would drive most restaurateurs into bankruptcy.

What would also lead them toward bankruptcy, unless they could control it better than the St. Regis's executives seemed to be doing, was the
employees' habit of stealing food, liquor, and other commodities out of the kitchen and elsewhere in the hotel with such brazenness and regularity that Nicola was certain that there would soon be a crackdown and the entire workforce, including himself, would be discharged and maybe prosecuted in a court of law. Still, the workers' prodigious purloining of food supplies and numerous other portable items went on with impunity, week after week, month after month; what amazed Nicola most of all about it was how casually and openly the workers indulged in their larcenousness, how unafraid they seemed to be about being caught while looting the larder, the pantry, the freezer, and the liquor cabinet. They even spoke aloud among themselves about what they planned to take home after work, never defining it as stealing, but using instead a euphemism—“valising.” They would ask one another, “What are you going to valise tonight?” They customarily referred to a coworker as a “valise”: “Who's that new valise the chef just hired?”

After Nicola had been at the St. Regis for a few weeks without revealing larcenous tendencies, a fellow worker approached him one night and asked, “Hey, how come you don't valise anything around here?” Nicola explained that he did not have a refrigerator in the single-room apartment he rented in the Bronx, and since he also lived alone and nibbled on the job, he had no reason to practice valising. “You'd better find a reason,” the man said, adding that otherwise Nicola might be seen as behaving disrespectfully toward his coworkers. And so Nicola became a valise, doing as the others did, coming to work often with an empty shopping bag folded inside his shirt, or a canvas carrier strung over his arm, into which he might later deposit assorted vegetables or a few filet mignons or whatever he thought would be appreciated by the wife of his landlord in the Bronx, a man who had a large family to support and who had always been lenient regarding overdue rent.

One night, Nicola was riding home on the subway, standing next to a St. Regis busboy who, unknown to Nicola, was carrying several raw eggs in the pockets of his jacket and trousers. Suddenly, as the subway lurched and screeched to a halt, one of the passengers lost his balance and fell against the boy, cracking open all the eggs and causing a gluey mess to trickle down the boy's legs, onto his shoes, and then across the floor—sending Nicola and the other passengers into quick retreat. Nicola later wondered why the boy would be stuffing his pockets with things so fragile and so relatively inexpensive as four or five eggs. It was certainly worth the trouble to walk off with a few filets, or a tin of caviar, or occasionally a bottle of cognac, as he had done—but fewer than a half dozen
eggs
? A few nights later, just before closing time in the St. Regis kitchen, Nicola
watched as another worker inserted only a single onion, a piece of garlic, and some parsley into his coat pocket, and Nicola asked him on the way out, “Why bother taking that stuff?” “My wife needs it,” the man said. “It isn't worth much,” Nicola replied. “Yes,” the man said, “but my wife would have to buy it. A penny here, a penny there, it all adds up to dollars I don't have to spend and the hotel will never miss.”

The St. Regis workers who were employed outside the kitchen seemed to be far more flagrant as freebooters than were Nicola's coworkers. A few of the former once arranged for the permanent disappearance from the hotel of a number of Persian rugs that had been set aside to be cleaned and repaired; on another occasion, three pianos in need of tuning were carefully rolled down the hotel's ramp and placed within a truck that would never return with them. There were investigations by the management, but Nicola never knew of a case in which an investigation produced incriminating evidence. And he believed that the workers more or less justified their valising as compensation for their lowly wages and also as a reaction to the great wealth, privilege, and waste that they saw all around them, as personified by the hotel's guests.

Coming from a family background in which little was spent and nothing was wasted, Nicola was overwhelmed by the bountiful squandering that was evident whenever he and his coworkers began to clear the tables in the ballroom after each banquet and then returned to the kitchen carrying plates of uneaten food, and several uncorked bottles half-filled with champagne, and more flowers than would adorn a mafioso's funeral, and bundles of decorative crepe paper that was partly torn and speckled with dried wax, and dozens of frivolous and forgotten party favors, and countless chips of delicate dessert cookies that Nicola sampled and that sweetened his appetite while reducing his scruples about leaving the hotel later with a few uncooked chunks of beef wrapped in tinfoil and tucked under his hat. Furthermore, he reminded himself that what he stole was not out of his own greed, but for the benefit of the needy family of his landlord; a second reason that valising seemed harmless to Nicola was his belief that the hotel's executive chef and the other department heads were aware of what was going on within their domains and they quietly condoned it as long as it did not threaten their positions with their superiors in the main office.

To be sure, there
had
been a few incidents that had taxed the patience of the normally easygoing chef Nicola worked under, and such an occasion was the theft of one of the two baby lambs reserved for a private dinner in the Louis XV Suite that was to be hosted by the hotel's owner, Vincent Astor. Although the chef's follow-up investigation indicated
that no one in the kitchen had been responsible, the experience had motivated within him an uncharacteristic surge of scrupulousness; and a few days after the baby lamb's disappearance, as the chef was saying good night to one of his cooks—a cook whom the chef had earlier observed placing a pound of butter under his hat—the chef said to the cook, “Wait a minute, don't go yet. I need to talk to you. Let's go into my office.”

The chef's office was a small glass-partitioned room located next to a boiler tank. The room was very hot, since the overhead fans had been turned off and the boiler was still hissing steam. The cook, wearing a heavy overcoat and porkpie hat that was tilted forward over his round and swarthy face, sat down in front of the chef's desk and waited. The chef, after seating himself and unbuttoning his shirt collar, opened a drawer to his desk. He removed a few pages from a folder and spread the pages in front of him. As he read, he began to fiddle with the steelrimmed glasses that rested on the nose of his raw-boned, ruddy face. He removed the glasses and wiped the foggy lenses slowly and repeatedly with a linen cocktail napkin. He paid no attention to the cook. With his glasses back on, the chef resumed reading.

The cook unbuttoned his overcoat and remained seated, waiting patiently, perspiring noticeably. The chef, after reading for about five minutes, reached across the desk for the phone and dialed a number. Someone soon responded on the other end, and for the next ten minutes the chef chatted in a friendly fashion with this person about matters unrelated to the hotel. The cook was now squirming in the seat and, with both hands on the rim of his hat, he pulled downward, trying to reduce the flow of the unctuous yellowy liquid that was trickling down from his forehead and dripping from his earlobes onto the collar of his coat.

The chef chatted on for another three or four minutes. After hanging up the phone, he looked directly at the cook, whose face was now glistening thickly with a kind of lava flow of melted butter.

“You know,” the chef said, “you don't look good. I think you should hurry home and call a doctor.”