The United States of Arugula (24 page)

AS IMMEDIATELY POPULAR
as Chez Panisse was, it nearly didn’t survive its first year, and for a very counterculturish reason: no one had any business sense. “Those of us who were working hard figured somebody had a handle on it, that the cash flow was being properly managed—and we were wrong,” says Jerry Budrick, who was a waiter on opening night and remained on staff for seventeen years, becoming the headwaiter and in-house handyman in the process. “It turned out that nobody had any idea of how much was going
out compared to what was coming in. The whole operation was sliding deeper into debt.”

The absurdly optimistic initial plan was for the restaurant to serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner, “seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to two in the morning,” says Waters. “That was foolishness.” The breakfast was quickly phased out, and lunch became a rudimentary mix of soups, sandwiches, and the previous night’s leftovers. But even with these cutbacks, the hours were still impossibly long for Waters, which put a strain on her health and her relationship with Luddy. “She was a total workaholic, and I was very impatient and angry with her much of the time,” he says. “She had no time for anybody—-just driven, driven, driven. I wanted her to take Sundays off and be more reasonable about her health. I remember once coming to the kitchen and seeing her sitting on an upturned pot, and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ She said that she couldn’t see—she was blind. Her system had short-circuited, and she sat there maybe, like, an hour before her sight came back.”

Luddy and Waters broke up, and Aratow, too, soon fell away, eager to devote his time to filmmaking and unable to reconcile his desire to make a buck with Waters’s high ideals, spendthrift ways, and what he calls her “China-teacup personality.” “I’d say, ‘We’ve gotta put another four tables in or we’re gonna go down!’” he says. “And she would say, ‘No, it’ll be too crowded!’ She didn’t really care about the money.” Victoria Wise didn’t last much more than a year, either, resigning as chef because she didn’t like working nights and didn’t like Waters’s interference in planning menus. “There wasn’t room in the kitchen for two bossy women, put it that way,” she says.

Still, for all the volatility, the place had a certain lusty, Pagnol-esque joie de vivre that was precisely what Waters was after. When it was over between her and Luddy, she simply moved on to Budrick, a jolly, Falstaffian sort who was known for drinking prodigiously even as he waited on tables. “We never had any rules about drinking on duty,” he says, “but we had an unwritten rule that you couldn’t smoke marijuana, because you can’t do a restaurant on
marijuana.” The restaurant’s most skilled prep cook was an elfin but temperamental artist named Willy Bishop—“the only real beatnik I’ve ever known,” says Budrick—who started out as a dishwasher but turned out to be a maestro with a chopping knife, and who specialized in unsellable psychosexual canvases: “these wild watercolors of guys jerking off and cum flying all over the place, with Mallarmé poetry written down the side. Or people sitting on toilets, you know, blowing themselves,” Jeremiah Tower says.

The staff, Waters included, broke out the good wine and Armagnac every night once the last of the customers had left, and casual, drunken pairings were the norm after hours. Waters also made a point of maintaining warm relations with her exes. So Luddy, who’d moved on from the Telegraph Repertory Cinema to run the Pacific Film Archive, continued to bring in filmmakers like George Lucas, Nicholas Ray, Roberto Rossellini, Satyajit Ray, and Akira Kurosawa;
*
and Goines, in 1972, designed the first of his annual Chez Panisse posters, an Art Nouveau–evocative image of a red-haired lady sipping from an aperitif glass.

“I do want all three of them,” Waters would say of Budrick, Luddy, and Goines in an early-eighties interview with
Savvy
magazine, when she wasn’t yet a mother or the James Beard Foundation’s Humanitarian of the Year, and therefore didn’t present as carefully crafted a public persona as she later would. “I wonder about my selfishness. I just don’t want to lose them. I’m not really jealous of their women, but I want them to want me most. You know, before I begin to cook, I have to touch the food. I’ll hold the leg of lamb. Touch the tomatoes. It’s the same as Jerry, Tom, or David—I want to go around and touch home base with them.” (At the time of the interview, she was dating the much younger Todd Koons, then a cook at Chez Panisse,
later to achieve foodie fame as the founder of Epic Roots, the mâche-in-a-bag people.)

IN 1972, THOUGH
,
the fun-loving abandon was taking its toll financially, and the future didn’t look good for Chez Panisse. With Wise about to leave and suppliers getting irritable about lack of payment, the restaurant seemed destined to be another failed let’s-open-our-own-place fantasy, albeit a quirkier and more hirsute one than most. Chez Panisse received a stay of execution, though, when Gene Opton of the Kitchen, who was a little older than Waters and company and actually ran a profitable business, agreed to come on staff as manager, pumping some of her own money into the enterprise, too. “Alice just said, ‘We really need some help,’” says Opton. “There was a little cottage in back of the house, and in the cottage there was a desk, and it had a drawer. I pulled open the drawer, and in it were stuck all these little bits of paper for their expenses. That was their record-keeping.” Opton did her best to straighten out the finances, and, when Wise left, took on some of the cooking responsibilities, alternating with Waters as chef even as she continued to run her shop.

This arrangement saved the restaurant from oblivion, but it couldn’t last, not least because the sensible, straightforward Opton was an ill fit with the freak parade, and, as Budrick says, “She wasn’t Gallic. It was a French restaurant, and she was bringing influences that were more of a stern nature, Germanic stuff.” Opton confirms that she cooked “some kind of braised beef, because I do have this Alsatian background, and, to go with it, a steamed pudding that included currants, and a lovely sweet-and-sour gravy to go over it. And Alice was not happy with that—it was a night that Tom Luddy brought Howard Hawks to dinner.”

Bishop, the only kitchen staffer who consistently performed his duties with some measure of professionalism, frequently grew exasperated at the chaos and ever-changing personnel, and threatened to quit on a regular basis, casting off his apron theatrically. But he couldn’t help but admire Waters’s
wiles in rallying people to her cause. “Whenever she got pressured, she’d turn into a little girl, make a little high voice, and everyone would just come and help her—involuntarily,” he says. “She knew how to work that. She was like one of the Gish sisters—she dressed like that, she looked like that, she was innocent and weak.
[Mimicking pale, consumptive nineteenth-century heroine]
‘Oh, who’s gonna help me? Who will peel the garlic?’ And
bada-boom!
Here come the troops!” Indeed, the English-born Gerald Asher, when he was new to San Francisco and working in the wine trade as well as writing for
Gourmet
, recalls paying a visit to Chez Panisse and being pressed into service by its hostess-owner “to shave carrots or something” as he waited for his dinner to be cooked.

“What you had at that time was a bunch of people in the kitchen who could do one specific dish well—nobody was well-rounded,” says Bishop. “When I did dinner with Alice, she would spend, like, two hours making a béarnaise, futzing around. Alice never had restaurant-cooking chops.”

“I will give her credit, she’s the best maker of salade composé I’ve ever seen,” says Staggs, the former maître d’. “She really has a mastery of making salads of diverse ingredients. I remember the first time she made this pigeon salad, with little lettuces from somebody’s garden up the hill and grilled pigeon, and warm vinaigrette made from the juices of the pigeon. I mean, she’s great at that. But when she would have to work the line, when some cook didn’t show up, she would be back there hacking a leg of lamb and get two orders out of it when a good cook could get seven or nine.”

Chez Panisse had become a special place in Berkeley, and, on account of Luddy, a filmmakers’ hangout and a rubbernecker’s paradise for film geeks. But it couldn’t go on functioning like this. And it certainly wasn’t yet an important place culinarily. The wine writer Robert Finigan, who was working for the restaurant critic Jack Shelton in 1972 and soon thereafter took over his newsletter—and who would later have his own romantic dalliance with Waters (apparently during one of her hiatuses from Budrick)—characterizes the restaurant as he remembered it then as a “beef-stew and fruit-tart bistro for students and junior faculty. That’s all it was. The presence of Jeremiah is what changed everything. Jeremiah really made the restaurant.”

“
JEREMIAH” IS, OF COURSE
,
the estimable Jeremiah Tower. In February 1973, though, Tower was a thirty-year-old gadabout with two Harvard degrees who’d never held a proper job and was down to his last twenty-five bucks. He was, in fact, merely Jerry Tower at the time. Only after he’d been hired, and Budrick had insisted that there could be just one Jerry at Chez Panisse, did he begin using his given name in its full regal splendor.

Stressed out and backed into a corner, Waters and Opton had resorted to placing an ad in the
San Francisco Chronicle
that sought out “an inspired and energetic chef who will plan and cook menus weekly for a single entrée five course dinner à la Elizabeth David and Fernand Point.” Tower happened to be staying in San Francisco at the time, sleeping on the couches of his Harvard friends Michael Palmer, the poet, and John Sanger. The West Coast was something of a last resort for Tower, who, since his graduation from college in 1965, had lived an itinerant life, using his good looks, pansexual appeal, and gift for ingratiation to insinuate himself into artistic and wealthy circles like a real-life version of Patricia Highsmith’s talented Mr. Tom Ripley.

He had traveled to Ireland and England, thinking, perhaps, that a career in the wine business might be in the offing, but, as he recalled in his 2003 memoir,
California Dish
, “My first visit to a wine company led only to the director’s bed and the advice that I was too ambitious to settle for never being able to own this, his boss’s family’s company.” Returning to the States, Tower journeyed to Carmel, California, where his grandmother lived, and borrowed her car to pay an unsolicited visit to the Big Sur home of the artist Emile Norman, who, scandalously for the time, was living openly with his male companion, Brooks Clement, in a mountaintop retreat where clothing was optional. Norman and Clement were only too happy to have the handsome young caller join them for a literal naked lunch, but California, at that time, offered Tower no ready job prospects. So he re-enrolled at Harvard, this time to get a master’s degree in architecture, and took up for a period with Annie Meyer, the granddaughter of the late
Washington Post
owner Eugene Meyer and niece of the
Post’s
then matriarch, Katharine Graham.

Unlike Tom Ripley, Tower came from a reasonably well-to-do background and had a talent beyond oleaginous charm: he could cook up a storm. Though American-born, he was reared mostly in Australia and England, spending much of his childhood in pampered solitude in grand hotels and on ocean liners while his disengaged parents—Dad a peripatetic WASP business executive, Mom a kindly but alcoholic gardening enthusiast from a wealthy Irish Catholic family—attended to their professional and social obligations. This upbringing imbued him with both an ambiguous quasi-British accent and a precocious love of Escoffier-style
grande cuisine
as it was still practiced in the 1950s in places like London’s Hyde Park Hotel and the kitchens of the
Queen Elizabeth.

A true culinary-freak prodigy on the level of the young James Beard, the boy Tower feasted eagerly on
tête de veau
, calf’s head, with
sauce gribiche
, the classic French mayonnaise made of hard-boiled eggs, vinegar, and parsley, and amused himself by splurging on treats from the food halls of Harrods and Fortnum & Mason. (Fortunately, he had the metabolism and athleticism to offset the constant gorging; Beard was not so lucky.) Unlike Waters, Tower had a culinarily savvy mother, and came to understand the value of fresh, seasonal ingredients by helping out with her garden in the English countryside, which yielded fantastic beans, herbs, and strawberries, not to mention the edible nasturtium flowers with which he would later adorn salads in America, kicking off one of the more ridiculous food trends of the 1980s. Tower learned to cook by observing his mother in the kitchen (she was a dab hand at the stove when she wasn’t drinking too much), intuiting his own versions of what he’d eaten in fine restaurants, studying
Larousse gas-tronomique
and whatever cookbooks he could get his hands on, and following the recipes sent to him by his favorite relative, his mother’s eldest sister, a flamboyant Auntie Mame type who lived in Washington, D.C., with her second husband, a rich Russian czarist who had fled during the Revolution and ran with a crowd of decadent, vodkaed-up aristo-exiles.

At Harvard, Tower’s cooking chops attracted as much notice as his cheekbones and jawline. Underwritten by his father and the rich kids to
whom he was naturally drawn, he spent prodigious sums on Château d’Yquem, the king of all Sauternes, and the finest cuts of beef, whipping up ever-more elaborate meals for his louche, too-cool-for-campus circle, whose members enjoyed not only his interpretations of classical cuisine but such inventions as “Consommé Marijuana” (made with chicken stock, fresh basil, sea salt, pepper, and “one packed cup marijuana stems and seeds”). Though he dabbled in student activism, Tower never came close to sharing the conviction of Waters and her crowd, declaring himself “annoyed by the crude fascism” of Students for a Democratic Society, the largest of the national student organizations. His idea of revolution was to prepare a feast for the prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn—who performed in Boston while he was at grad school and, to his delighted surprise, accepted his invitation to dinner—with a menu that consisted entirely of ingredients and vintage Lafites that his roommates had stolen from Cambridge shops.