Famous Nathan (26 page)

As befits a pair of freethinking iconoclasts, Minnie and Sol lived together before marriage, a relative rarity in those days. They also did not abide by gender-restrictive wedding traditions. They went together to pick out the bride's dress. They also arrived together at Casa del Rey, the banquet hall on Coney Island Avenue where the ceremony was to take place. It was Nathan and Ida who brought the tradition to the event, fattening up the guest list and underwriting the elaborate reception—not exactly a working-class affair.

Always, the store beckoned. When Minnie and Sol were about to have their first child, Nathan decided the proletariat experiment of the machine shop would have to end. He dispatched Murray as an emissary to lure Sol back to Nathan's Famous.

“Murray came to our apartment,” Minnie recalled. “I believe I was pregnant with Nora at the time. He came with the request from Nathan that Sol return to work at the business. He was going to have a family, Murray said, and this was what he needed to do.”

Murray added a sweetener to the deal. It is unclear if the suggestion came from Nathan and was only relayed by Sol's big brother. If Sol returned to work at the store, Murray said, he would have extra disposable income—funds that he could then donate to progressive causes, as both Murray and Nathan knew Sol would want to do. It would not be the first time that the wages of capitalism would be applied to further the goals of socialism.

Sol yielded. Working at his father's business would definitely be a lot more lucrative than slaving away at the machine shop or organizing labor meetings. He was going to have children to think of now.

In the midst of this, Murray performed a sort of rearguard action to protect his position at the store.

“He wanted a written commitment from our father,” Sol said. “When my father was gone or couldn't run the business anymore, Murray wanted it in writing that he would run it, that he would be in charge, no questions asked. No threat from me. He wouldn't have to answer to me for anything. My father wasn't willing to do that—which was interesting, I thought, but he wasn't.”

Murray believed because he brought Sol back into the business, that his brother owed it to him to follow his lead. “That was a source of conflict,” said Marsha Abramson, who worked with both Murray and Sol on the business's PR.

Even without written assurances, by the time Sol came back to work at the store, Murray had a firm grip on the reins of power. He had been his father's second-in-command for five years and had settled into a management position. His innovation of bringing in a seafood menu was paying big dividends. On the other hand, Sol's years of independence had cemented his position as an outsider. He was having to play catch-up, and his big brother refused to help.

“He wasn't interested in helping me learn,” Sol recalled. “Whenever I asked him about anything, he told me, ‘Go out and learn the way I did, on your own.'”

The dismissal burned in Sol's mind. He would quote Murray's words again and again, to his wife and, later in life, to anyone who would listen.
Go out and learn the way I did, on your own
.

“I found that hard to understand,” Sol said. “If I was in his position, I would have been happy to have somebody learn as much as they could and help relieve me of some of the pressures of running the business.”

Marsha Abramson had a measured opinion about the different philosophies of the two men. Sol, she said, “was a very thoughtful, very analytic person. Before he would make a decision he wanted to know all the facts, the positives and the negatives. He would weigh them very carefully and he didn't rush into decisions.”

Murray, on the other hand, “would move much faster. He was impatient, shall we say impulsive. If he wanted something done it had to be done immediately. There was a clash of personalities. Sol said, ‘I want to know more about it before I make a decision.' Murray said, ‘I am the older brother and if I say this, this is right.'”

Three years after his brother's successful expansion into seafood, Sol proposed installing a delicatessen counter in the store. This also involved an expansion from the core menu items of franks and hamburgers. The deli offered sliced meat sandwiches of every kind, and it, too, proved very successful.

The location of the two counters, seafood and delicatessen, symbolized the growing estrangement of the brothers. Sol's deli opened onto Schweikerts Walk, facing west. Seafood was in the opposite corner of the store. The two new counters were located as far as they could be from each other, while still remaining within the confines of the same building.

“I was very unhappy,” Sol recalled of this period. “It was difficult when I came home at night. I was upset by things that had occurred during the day, the things that Murray had said. I was affronted by many things, because he didn't understand that I wasn't a competitor. He saw me as a competitor. It was impossible.”

Much of this was left unspoken at the time. Sol found it difficult to speak to his brother about the situation. When asked, Murray always declined to comment on family frictions.

“I never talked about our differences with Murray,” Sol said. “There was never any discussion about it, never. He never brought it up. He never wanted to talk about it, so why was I interested in talking about it? I would only aggravate myself. So what's the point?”

Something had to give, and soon enough, it did. But it was Murray, not Sol, who would be the first one to leave Nathan's Famous. And he kicked himself out of the nest all on his own.

 

16

Glory Years

“Who marches into the dining room? There's Jackie Kennedy—Wow!” Nathan and Ida serve Governor Nelson Rockefeller
(center right)
.

IF THE LATE
1930s represented one heyday of Nathan's Famous, and the upheaval of wartime was something of a special case, then the 1950s marked a return of the store to peak form. The country yearned to get back to the good times of the prewar period. For a lot of people, a Nathan's Famous frankfurter held a nostalgic promise. Once again, customers lined up so deep outside the store that, as one counterman stated, “You could never see the sidewalk.”

Few of those customers knew that Coney Island's demise was already being plotted by the city's power broker, Robert Moses. They didn't know anything about the mounting frictions between Murray and Sol. They spilled from the subway at the Stillman terminal, hit Nathan's Famous, went on the rides, enjoyed the beach, and then, on the rebound, hit Nathan's Famous once again. On the sunny, sand-in-your-shoes surface, all was serene and untroubled. After the horrors and upheavals of war, happy days were here again.

Feltman's closed in 1954. Nathan's Famous stood alone, having risen to the level of an American icon. It seemed that every Broadway and Hollywood star, every mayor, every gangster, VIP, socialite, and celebrity made the pilgrimage to the busy hot dog stand on Surf Avenue. Most of them ate like everyone else did, standing up.

The long list of celebrity customers told the story. Jimmy Durante, Cary Grant, Harry Belafonte, Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Liza Minnelli, Robert Kennedy, Lucille Ball, Marilyn Monroe, Art Carney, Jerry Lewis, and many others all dined at Nathan's Famous at one point or another.

Occasionally, the big names resorted to the store's tiny dining room. Richard Traunstein, who served as a waiter there for many years, recalled a memorable visit. “Who marches into the dining room? There's Jackie Kennedy—wow!—in the schmutzy dining room of Nathan's, in the back, totally slumming it.”

During this period, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller visited the store with a retinue of aides and photographers. He hobnobbed with Nathan and Ida and made sure the man in the street saw him, the oil company billionaire, as a man in the street just like them.

Rocky made a pronouncement that day: “No politician in New York can ever hope to be elected without being photographed eating a hot dog.”

When the line got quoted later, Nathan's PR team of Max Rosey and Morty Matz made sure it contained an additional vital two words. “No politician in New York can ever hope to be elected without being photographed eating a
Nathan's Famous
hot dog.” That's how Rocky's rule of thumb went down in history.

The shock troops who served as the store's countermen went a long way toward making the Nathan's Famous experience what it was. Joe Handwerker continued to run a very tight ship. During the high summer season, Nathan and Ida were there, just as in the pre-war days.

The boss demonstrated common-sense intelligence in his choice of employees. Many of them came to the store via unorthodox paths. Gerry Monetti was a case in point. Years before, in the thirties, Nathan had engaged in a price war with a nearby drink-and-hot-dog stand. Located a block away on Fifteenth Street and the Bowery, next to Steeplechase Park, the place went by the delightful off-rhyme name of Patsy's Tasties. Monetti was a manager there.

Kicking off the price war, Monetti matched Nathan's Famous by offering a five-cent frank. Nathan undercut him by offering a frankfurter and a drink for seven cents. Monetti responded with a six-cent frank-and-drink special.

“We kids were always waiting for bargains,” reminisced one-time Coney Island street urchin Pat Auletta. “After all, it was our nickels and dimes, and we had to stretch them as far as we could. We knew this was taking place, and we knew that eventually we'd get a better bargain.”

Finally, Nathan temporarily lowered his price to a nickel for a drink
and
a hot dog. Monetti was forced to throw in the towel. Patsy's Tasties eventually went out of business, and Gerry Monetti came to work for Nathan.

He proved to be standout employee, a fixture on the fried-potato station. A heavyset guy with a large, Buddha-like belly, Monetti figures in the recollections of many people for his stripped-down working attire, no matter how cold it was and how bitter were the winds that blew in off the Coney Island Channel. The counters at the store featured open windows in every season.

“There was no heat in the kitchen,” recalled the store's personnel director, Charles Schneck. “In the winter, managers used to come into the walk-in refrigerator to warm up.”

None of that mattered to Monetti.

“He was very jovial and very loud, always yelling things out for the crowd to hear,” Sol recalled about one his favorite employees. “He was the kind of guy that always used to fascinate me because in the wintertime, in the coldest days of the winter, he'd walk around with a T-shirt. He was not cold. His body held so much heat that he could stand it.”

Sammy Fariello came to the store by a roundabout route similar to Monetti's. He didn't apply for a job with Nathan's Famous because he already had one. Before widespread refrigeration rendered the practice obsolete, he delivered bulk ice to the store for the big drink containers, hefting the blocks with heavy-duty tongs. Nathan must have liked something about the back of Fariello's neck, since he offered to take the deliveryman on. The iceman cometh.

Fariello proved to have the fastest hands of any counterman in the history of the business. He earned the top post in the store, the corner frankfurter griddle, where he could serve hungry hordes crowding in to the counter from both Schweikerts and Surf. He wielded a different kind of tongs now and could handle multiple franks at once, laying them into their buns in rapid-fire succession.

Customers could order four frankfurters, say, reach into their pockets or purses for the change, and by the time they produced the money, Fariello would already be there, extending the four franks in one hand and taking coins with the other. It was an amazing performance, more prestidigitation than food service.

“We had people who used to come by the store just to watch him,” Sol recollected. “They'd stand there to see how quickly he served a hot dog.”

One of the TV variety shows of the day filmed Sammy for the delight of its viewers. The producers clocked Fariello. It turned out he could dish up sixty frankfurters nestled into toasted rolls in sixty seconds—accepting payments and making change all the while. He maintained a steady pace for whole shifts, selling a hundred hot dogs every five minutes. At times, it was the customers who couldn't keep up with Sammy, instead of the other way around. Fariello's longtime fans knew enough to have money in hand by the time they made it through the crowd to his counter.

There were no regular lines during a classic Nathan's Famous crush. Customers simply pushed forward in a disorderly mob. Front countermen, such as Fariello and Monetti, became adept at dealing fairly with the crowds, never letting any one person believe he or she had been ignored.

The informal store practice was called “the sweep,” beginning with one end of the station, taking care of one customer, moving to the left to take care of the next, continuing on to the other end of the station, at which point the counterman would reverse direction and take orders to the right. Back and forth it went, a nonstop barrage of food, delivered in a steady, machine-gun-style spread.