Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (39 page)

After Hyatt’s call, Blinder spoke to Goodwin and arranged a lunch for himself, Goodwin, Kearns and Arnold Gingrich, the editor in chief and founder of
Esquire
. Goodwin arrived at the lunch with a set of papers containing a legal complaint and an itemization of grievances against the article. Blinder told Goodwin he had three alternatives: he could write a letter to the editor, he could sue, or he could forget it. Goodwin said that
a letter to the editor would simply be his word against Burlingham’s. But he indicated that he would be willing to work something out short of a lawsuit. At this point, Arnold Gingrich made a suggestion. He wrote a monthly column in which he often commented on articles in the magazine, and he might be able to write something that would reflect Goodwin’s version of events. A token payment of one thousand dollars was mentioned, and everyone went home. A few weeks later, Goodwin met with Gingrich to draft the column. The next day, Gingrich was hospitalized with lung cancer; he died in July.

While Gingrich was ill, the column that appears in this issue was written by Don Erickson, now editor in chief of the magazine. In it, Gingrich relates that after reading Burlingham’s article, which portrayed Goodwin as a Sammy Glick, he was surprised to meet Goodwin and find no trace at all of the ruthlessness Burlingham alluded to. Burlingham’s portrait, said Gingrich, “is sufficiently at odds with the man himself that an appraisal is in order.… The piece made him out to be a guy who didn’t pay his debts. But what we didn’t say was that he had never had his credit withdrawn anywhere and that, with his holdings in Maine, he has assets several times his liabilities. And we made him out to be a man who goes around scaring people, including women, with guns. We didn’t report that his gun hobby has never gone further than shooting at small birds and clay pigeons. He never owned a handgun, he told me. The one we reported on turned out to be a toy belonging to his son, he said. We implied that he had a streak of kleptomania and produced an incident that didn’t prove it.”

As it continues, the column is extremely clever. It is framed as one man’s opinion, not as a formal apology,
so there was no need for the magazine to show it to the author or editor involved. It is full of “he said” and “he told me,” so that nothing is actually denied; still, the impression is that there was somehow faulty, incomplete or inaccurate reporting. Gingrich claims to be speaking as an editor in disagreement with the other editors of the magazine, but this is not really accurate. Gingrich was not just the founder of the magazine but its guiding spirit, and a reappraisal from him is considerably more loaded than a simple difference of opinion among equals.

But there’s more to the story. Erickson’s draft was sent to Goodwin for approval. Then, in June,
Esquire
received a letter from James St. Clair, who turned out to be Goodwin’s lawyer after all, demanding sixteen thousand dollars for Goodwin to pay the legal fees entailed in reaching the settlement. This came as a surprise to the management. Blinder was under the impression that the token payment of one thousand dollars was agreed upon; he also believed that this was to have been a transaction among gentlemen, not lawyers.
Esquire
’s house counsel, Ron Diana, replied to St. Clair on July 7. He said the magazine was completely unwilling to pay such a high fee, particularly because it continued to believe in the accuracy of Burlingham’s article; Diana instead offered five thousand dollars. Arnold Hyatt, the shoe man, then resurfaced. He called Blinder to say that Goodwin was shocked at the belligerent tone of Diana’s letter; Goodwin, all injured innocence, could not understand how things had gotten so unpleasant. Blinder was apparently persuaded by the call, and the $12,500 fee was arrived at. Blinder then sent Hyatt a case of champagne.

Out-of-court settlements are extremely complicated,
or so I have found from talking to lawyers in the past couple of weeks. They’re reached as a result of a combination of practical and ethical considerations. Generally speaking, though, if a magazine is willing to settle, the rule is this: if the magazine believes its article was right, it may settle for practical considerations and pay a token amount to avoid court costs. If the magazine is wrong, it may settle not only by paying off but also by printing a retraction, correction or apology. What is extremely rare—so rare that none of the lawyers I interviewed could recall a similar case—is for a magazine that believes it is right to pay off
and
print a retraction of sorts.

I can’t quarrel with the financial settlement Goodwin got. I don’t like it, but it’s a business decision, I suppose. But Goodwin got the money
and
the apology. This is a tribute to him: he is as crafty and manipulative and brilliant as Bo Burlingham said he was. But it’s a bad moment for this magazine. Abe Blinder told me that he had no problem with the settlement because: “There is no principle involved.” I would like to state the principle involved. It’s very simple. A magazine has an obligation to its writers and readers to stand by what it prints.

In any case, the Goodwin business is over. Bo Burlingham got $1,250 for his article and Dick Goodwin got $12,500 and an apology. There are all sorts of lessons to be drawn here, but the only one that seems to me at all worth mentioning is that I will henceforth try, when assigning articles on controversial subjects, to find writers who know the Tisch brothers.

In our conversation, Abe Blinder said that another reason he would probably not allow this column to run in
Esquire
was that Arnold Gingrich is dead and cannot
defend himself. I am deeply sorry that Arnold is dead, for many reasons. For one thing, he was a man who could change his mind, and I like to think that by now he might have come around to Burlingham’s way of seeing Dick Goodwin. For another, I think he meant it when he said what he did at the end of his monologue on Goodwin: “I’ve always said that this is a magazine of infinite surprises where people can say what they damn please, even to the extent of the editors disagreeing among themselves.” If he were alive, I think that on those grounds he would have allowed me to print this column in the magazine: he would also have admitted that I outfoxed him just a little bit on that one small point.

One last thing. I speak only for myself, but I would like to apologize to Bo Burlingham.

November, 1976

I’m not sure you can make a generalization on this basis, which is the basis of twice, but here goes: whenever I get married, I start buying
Gourmet
magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride’s disease. The first time I started buying it was in 1967, when everyone my age in New York City spent hours talking about things like where to buy the best pistachio nuts. Someone recently told me that his marriage broke up during that period on account of veal Orloff, and I knew exactly what he meant. Hostesses were always making dinners that made you feel guilty, meals that took days to prepare and contained endless numbers of courses requiring endless numbers of plates resulting in an endless series of guests rising to help clear. Every time the conversation veered away from the food, the hostess looked hurt.

I got very involved in this stuff. Once I served a six-course Chinese dinner to twelve people, none of whom I still speak to, although not because of the dinner. I also specialized in little Greek appetizers that involved a great deal of playing with rice, and I once produced something known as the Brazilian national dish. Then, one night at a dinner party, a man I know looked up from
his chocolate mousse and said, “Is this Julia’s?” and I knew it was time to get off.

I can date that moment almost precisely—it was in December, 1972—because that’s when I stopped buying
Gourmet
the first time around. And I can date that last
Gourmet
precisely because I have never thrown out a copy of the magazine. At the end of each month, I place it on the top of the kitchen bookshelf, and there it lies, undisturbed, forever. I have never once looked at a copy of
Gourmet
after its month was up. But I keep them because you never know when you might need to. One of the tricky things about the recipes in
Gourmet
is that they often refer back to recipes in previous copies of the magazine: for example, once a year, usually in January,
Gourmet
prints the recipe for pâte brisée, and if you throw out your January issue, you’re sunk for the year. All the tart recipes thereafter call for “one recipe pâte brisée (January, 1976)” and that’s that. The same thing holds for chicken stock. I realize that I have begun to sound as if I actually use the recipes in
Gourmet
, so I must stop here and correct that impression. I don’t. I also realize that I have begun to sound as if I actually read
Gourmet
, and I’d better correct that impression too. I don’t actually read it. I sort of look at it in a fairly ritualistic manner.

The first thing I turn to in
Gourmet
is the centerfold. The centerfold of the magazine contains the
Gourmet
menu of the month, followed by four color pages of pictures, followed by the recipes. In December the menu is usually for Christmas dinner, in November for Thanksgiving, in July for the Fourth, and in April—when I bought my first
Gourmet
in four years owing to my marriage that month to a man with a Cuisinart Food
Processor—for Easter. The rest of the year there are fall luncheons and spring breakfasts, and so forth. But the point is not the menus but the pictures. The first picture each month is of the table of the month, and it is laid with the china and crystal and silver of the month. That most of the manufacturers of this china and crystal and silver advertise in
Gourmet
should not concern us now; that comes later in the ritual. The table and all the things on it look remarkably similar every issue: very formal, slightly stuffy, and extremely elegant in a cut-glass, old-moneyed way. The three pages of pictures that follow are of the food, which looks just as stuffy and formal and elegant as the table itself. It would never occur to anyone at
Gourmet
to take the kind of sleek, witty food photographs I associate with the
Life
“Great Dinners” series, or the crammed, decadent pictures the women’s magazines specialize in.
Gourmet
gives you a full-page color picture of an incredibly serious rack of lamb persillé sitting on a somber Blue Canton platter by Mottahedeh Historic Charleston Reproductions sitting on a stiff eighteenth-century English mahogany table from Charles Deacon & Son—and it’s no wonder I never cook anything from this magazine: the pictures are so reverent I almost feel I ought to pray to them.

After the centerfold I always turn to a section called “Sugar and Spice.” This is the letters-to-the-editor department, and by all rights it should be called just plain “Sugar.” I have never seen a letter in
Gourmet
that was remotely spicy, much less moderately critical. “I have culled so many fine recipes from your magazine that I feel it’s time to do the sharing.…” “My husband and I have had many pleasant meals from recipes in
Gourmet
and we hope your readers will enjoy the following.…”
Mrs. S. C. Rooney of Vancouver, B.C., writes to say that she and her husband leaf through
Gourmet
before every trip and would never have seen the Amalfi Drive but for the February, 1972, issue. “It is truly remarkable how you maintain such a high standard for every issue,” she says. Almost every letter then goes on to present the writer’s recipe—brownies Weinstein, piquant mushrooms Potthoff, golden marinade Wyeth, Parmesan puff Jupenlaz. “Sirs,” writes Margy Newman of Beverly Hills, “recently I found myself with two ripe bananas, an upcoming weekend out of town, and an hour until dinnertime. With one eye on my food processor and the other on some prunes, I proceeded to invent Prune Banana Whip Newman.” The recipe for one prune banana whip Newman (April, 1976) followed.

“You Asked For It” comes next. This is the section where readers write in for recipes from restaurants they have frequented and
Gourmet
provides them. I look at this section for two reasons: first, on the chance that someone has written in for the recipe for the tarte Tatin at Maxwell’s Plum in New York, which I would like to know how to make, and second, for the puns. “Here is the scoop du jour,” goes the introduction to peach ice cream Jordan Pond House. “We’d be berry happy,”
Gourmet
writes in the course of delivering a recipe for blueberry blintzes. “Rather than waffling about, here is a recipe for chocolate waffles.” “To satisfy your yen for tempura, here is Hibachi’s shrimp tempura.” I could go on, but I won’t; I do want to mention, though, that the person who writes these also seems to write the headlines on the “Sugar and Spice” column—at least I think I detect the same fine hand in such headlines as “Curry Favor,” “The Berry Best” and “Something Fishy.”

I skip the travel pieces, many of which are written by ladies with three names. “If Provence did not exist, the poets would be forced to invent it, for it is a lyrical landscape and to know it is to be its loving captive for life.” Like that. Then I skip the restaurant reviews.
Gourmet
never prints unfavorable restaurant reviews; in fact, one of its critics is so determined not to find fault anywhere that he recently blamed himself for a bad dish he was served at the Soho Charcuterie: “The potatoes that came with it (savoyarde?—hard to tell) were disappointingly nondescript and cold, but I seemed to be having bad luck with potatoes
wherever
I went.” Then I skip the special features on eggplant and dill and the like, because I have to get on to the ads.

Gourmet
carries advertisements for a wide array of upper-class consumer goods (Rolls-Royce, De Beers diamonds, Galliano, etc.); the thing is to compare these ads to the editorial content of the magazine. I start by checking out the
Gourmet
holiday of the month—in May, 1976, for example, it was Helsinki—and then I count the number of ads in the magazine for things Finnish. Then I like to check the restaurants reviewed in the front against the restaurant ads in the back. Then, of course, I compare the china, silver and crystal in the menu of the month against the china, silver and crystal ads. All this is quite satisfying and turns out about the way you might suspect.