Looking at all the work Graydon Carter has done over the years, what it would be like to be one of his creations?
As Spy magazine, I'd be fearless, funny, ahead of my time, radical and brave. Were I Vanity Fair, I'd be glamorous and erudite. Say I was his restaurant, The Waverly Inn, I'd be delicious, nestled in a beautiful corner of Greenwich Village. As Airmail, I would fly through the air every week, telling everyone what they need to know.
And were I one of his five children or his beautiful wife Anna, I'd know what it feels like to be the focus of Graydon’s life.
As for his newly published memoir, When The Going Was Good, I'd be unputdownable and number five on the New York Times bestseller list.
But I would trade any of these just to be Graydon's friend, and that is what I am.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
A few nights ago, we gave a party at home
for Graydon Carter, celebrating the publication of his memoir. When
the going was good, It's not the easiest thing to
give a toast about someone you love to people who
love him.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
And this is what I said.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Looking at all the work Graydon has done over the years,
I wonder what it would be like to be one
of his creations. Where I Spy Magazine, I'd be fearless
and funny, ahead of my time, radical and brave. Were
I Vanity Fair, I'd be glamorous and erudite, with the
best writers photographers cover to cover. Say I was his restaurant,
(00:40):
the Waverley Inn, I'd be delicious, nestled in a beautiful
corner of Greenwich Village and the place everybody wants to
go to. As hermel, I would fly through the air
every week telling everyone what they needed to know. And
were I one of his five children or his beautiful
wife Anna, I'd know what it feels like to be
(01:02):
the focus of Graydon's life. As for the newly published memoir,
I'd be unput downable and number five on the New
York Times bestseller list. But I trade any of these
just to be Graydon's friend.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
And that is what I am.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
That is so sweet. It was sweet the other night.
That's sweet.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Name it twice. That was a good party.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
It was a wonderful time. You like it.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
It was just fun and it was cozy and glamorous
and a lot of friends, and it encouraged me on
my wife's quest to possibly resettle here.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yeah, but you like me. You like me.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
I guess I like being a host. Batter me too,
because I'm sort of in the service business.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Who have your.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Friends cooked really well? Do you have a friend that
you know if you're going to their house really really well?
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Bette Miller's husband, Martin is a wonderful cut I mean
that world class. And my son Spike, who lives here
in London. They and his wife Pip, they spent a
lot a lot of the pandemic with us and we
ate so well. They're great chefs. But most of my
friends don't cook. It's just a it's not a generational
thing for me.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
For men. Yeah, I think James Fox cooks, well, what
is it?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, I'm not surprised. But mostly if you meet your friends,
you do out for dinner.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
No, well, they can either come over or Yeah, we
go out to dinner a lot, and we go to
the Waverley and Waverley.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Let's talk about the Waverley. So you did that, be fair,
you've done spy. But you know why a restaurant?
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Why why?
Speaker 4 (02:30):
It was two doors down from our house in the
village and I was having dinner and there was a
for sale sign up on it. It had been around
since the nineteen twenties. So I was out to dinner
at Lane's one night with his friend Roberto Benabee, who
lived right around the corner from the Waverley, and we
were drinking and I said it's for sale, and we thought,
(02:52):
let's buy it, and so we did.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And we brought in partners.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Who would actually run restaurants, because neither was I'd never
been in a restaurant kitchen before.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
But we redid it. And I wanted in those days.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
What you want?
Speaker 4 (03:05):
What was your one of those days, all the restaurants
were like Italian, and we wanted America.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
This is nineteen it was twenty years two thousand and four.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Yeah, we wanted Red Bank cats, red leather bank cats,
good lighting, really soft good lighting. I wanted a mural
to go around the entire restaurant, and we wanted American food,
American comfort.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Food, because you couldn't get that in the village at
the time.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
There's a lot of Chinese, a lot of Italian, and
so we had Basil Walter, I helped design it, and
I had Ed Sewell, who's the greatest magazine illustrator of
the last sixty years. He did the mural of all
the Greenish Village great over the past.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Kind of gets you through dinner too, because you just
keep looking at it.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
And it tells the story back to you as well.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
I love murals in restaurants, and anyway, we're probably their
twenty second year now and it's it's done well. And
at the top of the menu it has a quote
from Donald Trump says.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Worst food in the city. And that hasn't hurt business.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Do you get involved in the food?
Speaker 4 (04:10):
We do tastings and when we're about to hire a
new chef, and but I do the seating every night.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Oh is it true? Is it? Is it a urban
myth that we had? People had to call you to
get a table.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
People do.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Yeah, me too, But yeah, but you could.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah, and so is it most nights? You know people
who are eating there? Is that why you if you
have strangers, how do you.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Know where to put them?
Speaker 4 (04:34):
A lot of the strangers, the staff will know them,
they'll know where to put them roughly where they are.
And but I, you know, there's like usually a half
dozen people I know, and I just make sure they
have a table roughly same at the table they had before.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
I like sitting at the same table. Do you so,
where do you sit in the way there?
Speaker 4 (04:49):
It's the first banquette when you come in, and this
way I can keep an eye and everything and see
what was coming in. And yeah, it just did.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
It's quiet.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
And when you go there, do you go table to table.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
And say, no, that's not my thing. I'm too shy
for that.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Yeah, it's very New York.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
It's like really not cool to go to say hello
to somebody at a table.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I think it depends on the restaurant.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
And I remember Sherman Billingsley who ran the Stork Club.
He used to have have his hand on the table
and he was talking to somebody when he joined somebody,
and he had these finger gestures like this, and the
staff saw the fingers a certain way, they knew to
come over and whisper in his ear to get them
away from those people.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
But I, you know, I see a lot of people
coming through and us all stand up and say, Hi.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Have you ever been to anybody from strange enough?
Speaker 4 (05:35):
Alex Rodriguez was a huge Yankee star back in the
day who lived a block down and he would do
a lot of like this sort of thing at the restaurant,
flicking his fingers.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
But when we we first.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Opened it, I didn't want hedge fund people there because
they're six guys and they have a big noise jeroboama
of like expensive wine. So we tried not to take
reservations from the two three area code, which is Greenwich, Connecticut,
is where all the hedge funds were. So we make
up some excuses why the restaurant had been shut down
for the night or.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
But is there something that would make you not go
back to riskers?
Speaker 4 (06:12):
In service wise, I don't really meet that many rude waiters.
It's rare and uh, And I think I'm so appreciative.
I'm a heavy tipper, and I'm so appreciative of the
fact that you're going to a place, somebody's gonna come
ask you what you want to drink, then going to
ask you what you want to eat. They're gonna bring
it to you, They're gonna make it, they're gonna bring
it to you, and they're going to clean up afterwards.
(06:34):
It's I mean, that is just like one of the
miracles of the world. I say, when people are cumbelaining.
There's a comedian in America. It says, people complain about
the seat on the airplane they're flying it. They said,
you're in a comfortable seat, thirty thousand feet in the air,
going six hundred miles an hour.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
That's one of the most amazing things in human history.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I think if you
go in thinking that you're going to be okay, and
that basically if.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
You're if you're let's say you move to a new
area and you go to a restaurant, if you're really nice,
just nice to the staff, you don't have to tip
like crazy, if you just really appreciated the staff, they'll
they'll treat you well every time you go.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
What about you. Have you banned anybody?
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:13):
I did once, Yeah I did. He was a guy
who worked in the music industry. And I was standing
at the past.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
No, no, he won't.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
He was like nobody, but he he turned, he said,
ruth He came up. He said, that was of the
best meals I've ever had. You know, it's just amazing.
It was fabulous, it was delicious. I loved it. And
then he just turned to the waitress who was standing
next to him, a French waitress, and he said, as
for you, you're an idiot, and I was like oho, and
so he she turned around and he left and I
(07:45):
followed him down and I said, you know, Simon, I
just I heard you say that.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Simon and somebody are Okay, we're going to figure this out.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Okay, I said, you know, I said, I heard you
say that, and you can't do that. He said, but
she is, and I said, and so I said, I
guess I won't be seeing you, you know, for a
long time. And he called up and he said to
the you know, to the manager, he said that, you know,
I you know, how much you know, I think I
(08:16):
think Ruthie has just banned me.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
You know, I think he's just banned me. And he said, well,
maybe she did. And he said, but you do understand
how much money I spend in this restaurant, and that
did not you know, in any call. He was really upset.
They called me the next day and said it. You know,
I said, he said, am I ever ever going to
be allowed to come back? I don't think so, but.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
You know, said I did. I said something like, you
give it a year. He said, you're putting me on
the naughty step for a year. I mean, this became
a huge thing, you know, but that was the only time.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
But you know, those now.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
If they're rooted at all to the stuff, that's that's
the thing. Pillow Green.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
He was awful.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
But our passion at her at the time had begged
me to have him come to this thing, and I,
against my better judgment, I said, yes, he was just
he was disgusting.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yeah, we had.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
My favorite story about Manning is about Damien Hurst and
his best friend called Aunt in the like eighties or nineties.
They you know, the Groucho Club with the Grouchow Club,
and they they said, like at three in the morning,
they close everybody out, and Damian and his friend were
completely god knows on what. So they they found a
(09:33):
ladder and so they got a ladder from some place
in Soho, and they climbed up to the balcony on
the first floor and they broke a window and they
went inside, and then they threw up all over the
pool table. And then they went and they got some
more alcohol out of the out of the fridge and
they drank that, and then they went and they probably,
you know, they again threw up, and they took more
(09:55):
food in the kitchen, and then they just broken another
thing trying to get into it. And they fell asleep,
completely passed out on the floor. And the manager came
in the next morning, Marianne, and she looked at them
and she said, you know, I could have you arrested
for breaking it in would I could have you and you
know break you know, arrested and throw you out for
you know, trashing my property. I could have you arrested
(10:19):
because you fell asleep here.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
And that could have been a fire. I could have you,
she said. Instead, you are banned for twenty four hours.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
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(10:52):
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Speaker 3 (10:59):
Now do you want to read your recipe?
Speaker 4 (11:06):
Beef carpacco Serve six for the beef three pound filet
of beef, salt and black pepper. Trim every bit of
fat from the beef, leaving a small cylinder of tender meat.
Chill well using a razor sharp knife, slice the meat
paper thin. Arrange the slices of meat on six small
(11:28):
plates to cover the surface completely. Drizzle the sauce over
the meat in ribbons. Serve immediately with the sauce one
cup of homemade mayonnaise, a half teaspoon of Worcester sauce,
one teaspoon fresh lemon juice, two tablespoons milk, salt and pepper.
(11:51):
Put the mayonnaise in a bowl and whisk in the
Worcester sauce and lemon juice. Add in enough milk to
make a thin sauce that coats the back of a
wooden spoon, taste the sauce and it just the seasoning,
and add more Worcester sauce and or lemon juice to
taste there. You know, simple one take, one take, you know,
that's what they called me. They called me one take harder.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Okay, So would you have ever had beef carpaccio in
your house growing up?
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Do you remember when you had your first carpaccia?
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Oh that was definitely New York. So it was a
big It was a big dish.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
In the nineteen eighties, and like around the time when
like sambuca, Remember sambuca was a thing with three coffee beans.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
And anyways, in New York, I never.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Had yes, yes, it was so corny.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
But I never had raw food knowingly until I came
to New York in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
What did you have at home? What was So there's
you and your.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Brother, your brother, brother, and sister and my mother was
I would I can only say this now that she's
she's dead. She wasn't the greatest cook. And I grew
up in Ottawa, which is the capital city. Very cold,
I mean very very cold, and a lot of snow,
and there weren't a lot of fresh vegetables when I
was growing up. It's probably a bit like London at
(13:09):
the time.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
The train that's what we have to talk about.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Well, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
I think I've had one guest of one hundred and
fifty guests work.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
As alignment for the railroads.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Alignment was that dangerous? Is it dangerous?
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:22):
I guess it could be.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
I mean the mothers in those days and fathers and
especially my my friends, they send their kids out to
toughen them up out to west and to you know,
they don't they didn't use that with this expression then,
but to sort of character build.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
So I sent out. My aunt was a vice chairman
of the vice president of the railway, so she got
me this job. And the thing was, you got paid
two dollars and eighty cents an hour year nineteen seventy
two dollars.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
An hour two work as an alignment climbing the telegraph poles,
and two dollars and twenty cents an hour if you're
a groundsman. So I signed out to be a grounds
I got I'm not climbing telegraph poles. So we would
get out there and I wind up in a living
in a box car with eleven other man, most of
whom had criminal records, and they had a big sort
of poster up on the wall sign that showed what
(14:14):
the railroad would pay if you lost a certain limb.
So it would be seven hundred and fifty dollars for
a leg and two hundred and fifty dollars for an arm,
and like seventy five dollars for a foot, and these
are Canadian dollars. And then you teach you how to
climb out a telegraph pole that you have spikes in
your shoes that are sort of manacled to the bottom
(14:36):
part of your leg, and big gauntlet gloves, and you
climb up. You basically walk up the thing and you're
holding under the pole. There's no safety belt. And then
you had to carry wire up the pole and we
turn take off the old wire and this is like
thirty forty feet in the air, and then put the
other wire up and then refascen it to these glass conductors.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Did you get to college after that?
Speaker 1 (14:59):
So then I come back, I go to college.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
I was going to study political science in Ottawa, and
I'm walking by a place where the big glass office
with a bunch of people with typewriters and young people.
And I stopped and I asked them what they were doing,
and they said they were starting a magazine. So I said, oh,
can you use an extra hand? And they said, well, we're.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Looking for an art director. I said, I said, well
I can draw.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
What was a magazine called The Canadian Review, and it
was a political literary magazine. It did nothing but lose money.
It was it was sort of valiant, but not very good,
and that was put out by people who never worked
at a magazine before. But the magazine got me to
New York and it got me a job at Time
(15:47):
Magazine as a writer. And Time then was this sort
of citadel of journalistic power. It had like something like
eight hundred employees at Time. In those days they.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Bureaus all over the world.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
The London bureau chief lived as well as the American
ambassador almost here.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
And so I remember one. He was called Eric Amphitheatro.
Did you ever know him?
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Definitely he was.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
He was really elegant man.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
They all were all those.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Square ye, they lived well smart.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
Yeah, And Time then was being restocked by this huge
collection of brilliant twenty somethings and like Walter Isingson was there,
and Frank Rich and Michiko Kako Tani, who became the
chief book critical of the New York Times. My partner
at Airmail Alessander Stanley. This is nineteen seventy eight. My
(16:40):
partner at Spy magazine Kurt Anderson. My best friend Jim
Kelly who became the editor of Time, Maureen Daoud who's
the Pulitzer Prize winning columnists for the Time. So it
was just there's about twelve of us, and we became
mostly became lifelong friends.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
What did you do? What was your I was a writer,
so you would write.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
What I was aflow right, So I wrote business stories,
show business.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
Stories, and and just about you know, press stories, just
about anything they assigned.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
To me, which was the social life.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Social life was great.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
New York in the eighties.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Early This is like New York late seventies, early eighties.
It was still before AIDS, and I was you know,
you're young. All of a sudden, you have an expense account.
Nobody had ever had an expense account before, and so
you were eating out lunches, You're eating out dinners.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Okay, let's talk about them.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
So what lunches we were Okay, So most lunches there
was over in the West fifties in New York.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
They were like there's.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
A row of French restaurants all and there someone were
still there. There was one called Rennie Poujol, there was
one called and there was Yea, and there's one called
Shane Napoleon. And the Rennie Poujol was the Life magazine hangout,
and Shane Napoleon was the Time magazine hangout, and she
(17:59):
you could go and by this time I did drink,
and so you could go and have two people for
lunch with a bottle of wine for twenty five dollars
a frenchman.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
I mean it was red check your table class.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
It seemed really reasonable when you were there.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, even then it seemed reasonable.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
You got fifty dollars for your leg and.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Then you could you could expense the lunch.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Did you go to the Four Seasons?
Speaker 1 (18:24):
I went to the four Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
I went to the fourth season when I was at
Time and I thought, I for some reason, it was
like about eight months after I got in there and
a friend took me and I had I thought it
was going to be old fashioned, like the oak room
at the Plaza and I remember seeing it for the
first time and I felt, this feels a bit air porty,
like it like an air But then you know, after
sitting in there for ten to fifty minutes, you realize
(18:48):
the brilliance of the whole thing. It just it just
it just wasn't what I was expecting. But then I thought,
in time, it was the most beautiful restaurant I'd ever
been to.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Did you ever have to fire at not a time.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
I was too low to fire anybody.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
I was.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
I was the class that was fired. You not the
firing class.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
But did you just thinking about it, fired career people in.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
My whole career, and three and three of them in
one week?
Speaker 3 (19:17):
But not at lunch? Not I'm going to take you
out to lunch?
Speaker 1 (19:19):
No much to much.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Did you use place of restaurants to hire people?
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Well, I was strange enough.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
I hired uh three people as assistants who were waiters
for me.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Did you if you can if you can.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Handle you know, three tables of eight diars, you can
handle anything on earth?
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Those were the lunches? Were your friends? Did you all
kind of get together at night to people?
Speaker 4 (19:44):
Oh, we know, we had dinner alment together almost every
single night, and we expended those meals as well, often
on you know, really flimsy uh pretext.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
And then you know, at.
Speaker 4 (19:54):
There was I went up with a with a rock
at I know, dating it was wonderful, you know, I
mean New York City. You know, American women were more
interesting than something.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Then your twenties.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
I was in my late twenties. Yeah, I had a
great apartment in the village. I was paying two hundred
dollars a month. It had a tall ceilings like this
and a wall of leaded glass and opened up onto
a garden. And that'd be like five thousand and six
thousand dollars. Now it's like seventies, eighties, eighties.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
So then we went from Time.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
So then I went to the I was assigned to
Life magazine. They had restarted Life in the seventies. They
closed it for about six years and then restarted it.
So I was assigned to Life magazine and as a
writer editor. And I was happy to be there because
I you know, I had I think my at least
(20:51):
one child. By then, I needed a job and I
had an H one visa which was tied to employment.
So I if I lost my job, I'd lose my
right to be in the United States. So I went
to work at Life Magazine. I was sort of I
could do my job in five hours out of a week.
So Fred and I started plotting a magazine set in
(21:15):
New York. I like Private Eye, but you know sort
of gloss you're looking that called Spy Magazine. That would
be sort of fact based, heavily reported, but funny magazine
about New York and the people that were then sort
of the defining characters of New York, people like Donald
(21:37):
Trump and Leona Helmsley and anyway.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
And it was how.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Would you get your how would you get your story?
Speaker 1 (21:44):
It's in people how to report on stories?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
And then did they have interview?
Speaker 2 (21:48):
So tell me who just stop and talk about the
President of the United States?
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Well that was me I had done. I used to
do a lot of writing on the side to make
ends meet. And I had been assigned by G magazine
in nineteen eighty three to do a story in this
up and coming real estate developer who was quite sort
of flashy.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
In the tabloids.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
And his name was Donald Trump, and I'd sort of
read about him, but I really follow what he did.
But it was his first national exposures. So he allowed
me to.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
He allowed me, he asked me to hang around with
for three weeks.
Speaker 4 (22:21):
So I spent a lot of time with him, and
I wrote the story and he hated it because I
were very slightly flashy, had a sort of MoU stretched limousine,
and I pointed out this one comment that I pointed
out that his hands looked too.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Small for his body. He really hated them.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
So we get to Spy and we have funny, you know,
rude epithets for people, and trumb sepithet was we called
him a short finger at Bulgarian, which is sort of
caught on and stuck it me.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
He has been quite young at that time, was he
He's he's four years.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Older than I am.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
So this is in the eighties, this is.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
In the mid eighties. And so anyway, Spy was actually
a huge hit. But the trouble is, our whole money
was based on printing just twenty you know, enough for
twenty five thousand circulation. We had to start, you know,
spending a lot more money on printing, and so after
five years, we we'd run out of money and we
sold it to Charles Sacci and Johnny pagatza ah. And
(23:27):
then I wanted to start a newspaper, twice a week
newspaper that would come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
And this man called Arthur Carter, no relation to me.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
He had this very sleepy newspaper on the Upper eas
Side called the New York Observer. And I mean, he said,
once you learn the business doing my paper, So I said, okay.
So I worked out a plan, a six month, twelve month,
eighteen month plan of how it'd change it. I'd go
to work on this and within six months it had
become sort of a thing. People reading it it. It
was sort of the local newspaper for the Upper East
(23:59):
Side and Greenwich Village, and it was starting to get noticed,
and I I started sending copies to editors in Paris
and London and things like that. And then Cy Knwhause
who owned Random House and Connie nast A Contie has
a big new magazine published that published you know, the
(24:22):
New Yorker and Vogue and Vanity Fair and GQ and
Architectural Digest in any number of other magazines. He offered
me the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and I chose
the New Yorker. But then, because we'd made fun of
Vanity Fair at Spy magazine, it was a major.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Target for us.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
And so but then the day it was supposed to
be announced, it was switched and Tina Brown became the
editor the New Yorker and I became the editor of
Vanity Fair. And I was not the most popular candidate
because we'd made fun of them for the last five years.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
An open kitchen in the River Cafe means we as
chefs are able to talk to our guests dining in
the restaurant, And now we're bringing that same ethos to
our podcast, a question and answer episode with me and
our two executive chefs. Send a voice note with your
question to Questions at Rivercafe dot co dot uk and
(25:13):
you might just be our next great guest on Ruthie's
Table four. Did you ever do anything about going back?
Speaker 3 (25:25):
What to eat? And you? Did you have any articles
about food critic? Nope, get a food critic?
Speaker 1 (25:31):
No.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
I had a restaurant critic, Adrian gil food who did
He did a story about this restaurant. I think John
George Uh was the cooking part and Richard Meyer had
designed it. It was down and try back.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Oh yeah, and.
Speaker 4 (25:48):
This article, this review was the rudest restaurant review that
had appeared in New York in decades. I mean there
was news stories about it. There were longer than the review.
So Adrian biz Our, he probably did two. I think
we did two restaurant reviews the entire time. Was there
one on this restaurant that Richard Meyer had done and
one on Lammy Louis.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
I was going to say, Lammy Louis, I remember that and.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
He called it the world's worst restaurant.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Yes, yeah, and so yeah, yes, I don't agree with
you totally.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
I think it's the rudest restaurant in the world. You think, so, yeah, yeah,
I think terribly rude. And it's filled with Americans anyway, So.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
The other day how much Chicken and Scout. It's kind
of old school, but you know, there is I think
they did, Like a lot of Persians, they kind of
realize at some point now it is Yeah, I hope
he doesn't touch it. Yeah, but do you think do
you think when you go to a city where you
want to eat, if you're in Paris.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
That's the first thing I think, So you do.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
So this person who doesn't think about you.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Oh no, no, no, my life isn't No. It's funny.
During the pandemic we were in We're in Provence.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
About is at the house? I came to yes, yes, yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:04):
And so during the pandemic, and I actually loved the
quietness of it and just you know, the peacefulness of it.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
She could just read.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
But we had a beautiful market town right near It's
called Valbon, and it's a sixteenth century market town, not huge,
but built on a grid like Manhattan. And during the
pandemic we'd go in and walk around and there's no restaurant.
The restaurants couldn't open. There was one that filled the
entire square, and you just realized. I came back thinking that,
(27:34):
realizing that restaurants are the heart.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
And soul of a city.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
It's where you get engaged, it's where you break up,
it's where you celebrate a.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
New job.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
It's where you bemone having been fired. It's where you
gather with your friends. It's without you take restaurants out
of a city, and a city is dead.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
So when you go to a city, if you know
you're going, what do you do in terms of finding
out where to eat?
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Do you call friends?
Speaker 4 (27:58):
No, No, I have my my my restaurant list for
you know, Paris and London and Los Angeles.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Yeah, where would you go?
Speaker 2 (28:07):
If I'm Sam going to Gordon, it's Ruthie, I'm going
to la Where should I use?
Speaker 1 (28:11):
You know something?
Speaker 4 (28:12):
We have every meal at the Chateau Marmount. You stay
there and we just have all the meals there.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
So tell us about the Vanity Fair Oscar party.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Did you get.
Speaker 4 (28:21):
Involved in the menu everything and every single detail? We well,
we did it with Thomas Keller and he did these.
It's good and so it's a long night, so you
want to have some food that soaks up the alcohols.
He made these beautiful small lasagnas and we had but
we've also had an in and out stand to give
(28:43):
Hamburgers to people as well. You don't sit down and
you sit down for you sit down for three and
a half hours and watch the Oscars. So the one
hundred and fifty people come at the beginning of the
sit down and you have big screens all around, so
you watch the Oscars and these are older movie stars
or people who aren't not that year, and you have
artists and writers and you know, all the rest of
that sort of thing, and then you have then all
(29:06):
the then maybe three or four hundred and then maybe
five or six hundred over the course of the whole
evening come from the oscars, So.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Then it becomes just a giant milling party.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
And I believe or not, most movie stars don't know
each other because unless they worked on a movie together,
they don't know the other person. So they some of
them asked me to introduce them to somebody else. And
all parties in those days, big parties always had some
vip roped off area and I didn't want any of that.
I thought, we're gonna make it hard to get him.
But once you're in, you're everybody's treated the same, which
(29:39):
is well. We treated people really well, and we looked
after Like at the dinner, we had like, you know,
the Zippo lighters for everybody with saying from one of
them from a famous movie on it, and we had
our own ashtrays and they're all meant to be stolen.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
So what do do? The menu was talked to Thomas
Keller do it every year too?
Speaker 4 (29:55):
No, we I'm trying to. I can't remember who did it.
He did it for many years and I can't remember
who did it before him, but we would do tastings.
Oh yeah, tasting and just going through the design of
the table. And we had her own lamps made and night.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Well everyone like in yes.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
But I remember once said at one of the parties
we did at the during the Cannes Film Festival at
the hotel the cap and Sarah Marx, who organized these
things for us, she was the head organizer, she came
home and said, oh, you got to come quickly.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Isabelle Hubert is just I think she's dead. I said,
what do you mean. So we rush over and.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
They've got her lying down on a sofa and she's
the color of asphalt and she's not moving, and I think,
oh my god, she's dead. We've killed her, and I
said and I said, no, nothing kills past a party
fashion and the dead actors either. And so we were
standing there watching her. All of a sudden she moved
(30:58):
and I thought, oh, thank god. So very carefully the staff,
the hotel staff, got the call to the an ambulance,
got a gurney to come in through the kitchen very
quietly so no other guests would see, to get her
under the gurney and wheel her back out to the
back door off to the hospital and she's fine. And
what had happened was, you know, she had sort of
(31:18):
worn a very tight dress and didn't want to, you know,
have any bulges from eating, so she only drank and
had no food.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
Do you listen to people's dietary requirements?
Speaker 1 (31:34):
No, no, you can't.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
With one hundred c Most of this was before everybody
had a dietary problem, and we tried to avoid you know,
complicated things. But if you yeah, there's a vegetarian option,
and I mean if you wanted to, they could whip
up a salad if that's what you wanted. I mean,
you know we once you're a guest, we treat you
really well.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
We have gone through.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Actually, that thing that sticks with me is we're climbing
those poles in the train.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
But if you if you.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Climb the trains and it toughened you up, and you
want you know, Vanity Fair and my list of what
you've created, Spy and the Waverley And if you think
that that all this that you work hard, you need rest,
you need stimulation, you need fun, but you also need
comfort sometimes And so the question I always end this
(32:22):
podcast with and we're not going to end because we
could go on for another three hours. But if you
want comfort from food, would you say there's something that
you reach for when you need comfort?
Speaker 4 (32:32):
Well, I can't actually cook anything, but I think that
I love cheese.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
You know, a little slice of cheese can take the
edge off in the middle of the afternoon.
Speaker 4 (32:43):
My comfort go to at a restaurant in America is
a hamburger. I think it's almost the perfect dish. And
you can't have a successful restaurant in New York if
you're it has American food unless you make a great hamburger.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
So you can get them almostwhere.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
And you think you have the best burger in New York.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
No, no, no, no, no, we don't have the best thing.
We don't have the best anything in New York. But
the most restaurants who cover that level of food, they
all have great hammer You can't. It's it's pretty hard
to have a bad one. And there are many different
types of hamburgers now that they're like pizzas. Now they're
the people learn how to do them in a million
different ways. I actually had a great hamburger at the
(33:25):
park last night.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
That's great.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
The park that's a little sort of it's the very
American and the manual American slash Continental.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
What do you look for in a hamburger?
Speaker 4 (33:37):
And hamburger so not too big, people, some things make
them way too big. I think it's going to be,
you know, like an inch and a half thick and
a high quality either brioche or or a pretzel bahn.
And you know, a mixture meat not not cirlo. And
you wanted some chuck in there, some short ribbon there,
(33:57):
whatever they have, and I like it pretty playing with
cheez ketchup sometimes I like just pretty simple and maybe
a bit of mao oh.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
I don't have hamburgers, but we could go and have
some lunch.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Let's do that.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Thank you great, Thank you, Rithy.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership
with Montclair
You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
A few nights ago, we gave a party at home
for Graydon Carter, celebrating the publication of his memoir. When
the going was good, It's not the easiest thing to
give a toast about someone you love to people who
love him.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
And this is what I said.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Looking at all the work Graydon has done over the years,
I wonder what it would be like to be one
of his creations. Where I Spy Magazine, I'd be fearless
and funny, ahead of my time, radical and brave. Were
I Vanity Fair, I'd be glamorous and erudite, with the
best writers photographers cover to cover. Say I was his restaurant,
(00:40):
the Waverley Inn, I'd be delicious, nestled in a beautiful
corner of Greenwich Village and the place everybody wants to
go to. As hermel, I would fly through the air
every week telling everyone what they needed to know. And
were I one of his five children or his beautiful
wife Anna, I'd know what it feels like to be
(01:02):
the focus of Graydon's life. As for the newly published memoir,
I'd be unput downable and number five on the New
York Times bestseller list. But I trade any of these
just to be Graydon's friend.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
And that is what I am.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
That is so sweet. It was sweet the other night.
That's sweet.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Name it twice. That was a good party.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
It was a wonderful time. You like it.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
It was just fun and it was cozy and glamorous
and a lot of friends, and it encouraged me on
my wife's quest to possibly resettle here.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yeah, but you like me. You like me.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
I guess I like being a host. Batter me too,
because I'm sort of in the service business.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Who have your.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Friends cooked really well? Do you have a friend that
you know if you're going to their house really really well?
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Bette Miller's husband, Martin is a wonderful cut I mean
that world class. And my son Spike, who lives here
in London. They and his wife Pip, they spent a
lot a lot of the pandemic with us and we
ate so well. They're great chefs. But most of my
friends don't cook. It's just a it's not a generational
thing for me.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
For men. Yeah, I think James Fox cooks, well, what
is it?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, I'm not surprised. But mostly if you meet your friends,
you do out for dinner.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
No, well, they can either come over or Yeah, we
go out to dinner a lot, and we go to
the Waverley and Waverley.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Let's talk about the Waverley. So you did that, be fair,
you've done spy. But you know why a restaurant?
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Why why?
Speaker 4 (02:30):
It was two doors down from our house in the
village and I was having dinner and there was a
for sale sign up on it. It had been around
since the nineteen twenties. So I was out to dinner
at Lane's one night with his friend Roberto Benabee, who
lived right around the corner from the Waverley, and we
were drinking and I said it's for sale, and we thought,
(02:52):
let's buy it, and so we did.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And we brought in partners.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Who would actually run restaurants, because neither was I'd never
been in a restaurant kitchen before.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
But we redid it. And I wanted in those days.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
What you want?
Speaker 4 (03:05):
What was your one of those days, all the restaurants
were like Italian, and we wanted America.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
This is nineteen it was twenty years two thousand and four.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Yeah, we wanted Red Bank cats, red leather bank cats,
good lighting, really soft good lighting. I wanted a mural
to go around the entire restaurant, and we wanted American food,
American comfort.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Food, because you couldn't get that in the village at
the time.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
There's a lot of Chinese, a lot of Italian, and
so we had Basil Walter, I helped design it, and
I had Ed Sewell, who's the greatest magazine illustrator of
the last sixty years. He did the mural of all
the Greenish Village great over the past.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Kind of gets you through dinner too, because you just
keep looking at it.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
And it tells the story back to you as well.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
I love murals in restaurants, and anyway, we're probably their
twenty second year now and it's it's done well. And
at the top of the menu it has a quote
from Donald Trump says.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Worst food in the city. And that hasn't hurt business.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Do you get involved in the food?
Speaker 4 (04:10):
We do tastings and when we're about to hire a
new chef, and but I do the seating every night.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Oh is it true? Is it? Is it a urban
myth that we had? People had to call you to
get a table.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
People do.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Yeah, me too, But yeah, but you could.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah, and so is it most nights? You know people
who are eating there? Is that why you if you
have strangers, how do you.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Know where to put them?
Speaker 4 (04:34):
A lot of the strangers, the staff will know them,
they'll know where to put them roughly where they are.
And but I, you know, there's like usually a half
dozen people I know, and I just make sure they
have a table roughly same at the table they had before.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
I like sitting at the same table. Do you so,
where do you sit in the way there?
Speaker 4 (04:49):
It's the first banquette when you come in, and this
way I can keep an eye and everything and see
what was coming in. And yeah, it just did.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
It's quiet.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
And when you go there, do you go table to table.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
And say, no, that's not my thing. I'm too shy
for that.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Yeah, it's very New York.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
It's like really not cool to go to say hello
to somebody at a table.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I think it depends on the restaurant.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
And I remember Sherman Billingsley who ran the Stork Club.
He used to have have his hand on the table
and he was talking to somebody when he joined somebody,
and he had these finger gestures like this, and the
staff saw the fingers a certain way, they knew to
come over and whisper in his ear to get them
away from those people.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
But I, you know, I see a lot of people
coming through and us all stand up and say, Hi.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Have you ever been to anybody from strange enough?
Speaker 4 (05:35):
Alex Rodriguez was a huge Yankee star back in the
day who lived a block down and he would do
a lot of like this sort of thing at the restaurant,
flicking his fingers.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
But when we we first.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Opened it, I didn't want hedge fund people there because
they're six guys and they have a big noise jeroboama
of like expensive wine. So we tried not to take
reservations from the two three area code, which is Greenwich, Connecticut,
is where all the hedge funds were. So we make
up some excuses why the restaurant had been shut down
for the night or.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
But is there something that would make you not go
back to riskers?
Speaker 4 (06:12):
In service wise, I don't really meet that many rude waiters.
It's rare and uh, And I think I'm so appreciative.
I'm a heavy tipper, and I'm so appreciative of the
fact that you're going to a place, somebody's gonna come
ask you what you want to drink, then going to
ask you what you want to eat. They're gonna bring
it to you, They're gonna make it, they're gonna bring
it to you, and they're going to clean up afterwards.
(06:34):
It's I mean, that is just like one of the
miracles of the world. I say, when people are cumbelaining.
There's a comedian in America. It says, people complain about
the seat on the airplane they're flying it. They said,
you're in a comfortable seat, thirty thousand feet in the air,
going six hundred miles an hour.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
That's one of the most amazing things in human history.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I think if you
go in thinking that you're going to be okay, and
that basically if.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
You're if you're let's say you move to a new
area and you go to a restaurant, if you're really nice,
just nice to the staff, you don't have to tip
like crazy, if you just really appreciated the staff, they'll
they'll treat you well every time you go.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
What about you. Have you banned anybody?
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:13):
I did once, Yeah I did. He was a guy
who worked in the music industry. And I was standing
at the past.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
No, no, he won't.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
He was like nobody, but he he turned, he said,
ruth He came up. He said, that was of the
best meals I've ever had. You know, it's just amazing.
It was fabulous, it was delicious. I loved it. And
then he just turned to the waitress who was standing
next to him, a French waitress, and he said, as
for you, you're an idiot, and I was like oho, and
so he she turned around and he left and I
(07:45):
followed him down and I said, you know, Simon, I
just I heard you say that.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Simon and somebody are Okay, we're going to figure this out.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Okay, I said, you know, I said, I heard you
say that, and you can't do that. He said, but
she is, and I said, and so I said, I
guess I won't be seeing you, you know, for a
long time. And he called up and he said to
the you know, to the manager, he said that, you know,
I you know, how much you know, I think I
(08:16):
think Ruthie has just banned me.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
You know, I think he's just banned me. And he said, well,
maybe she did. And he said, but you do understand
how much money I spend in this restaurant, and that
did not you know, in any call. He was really upset.
They called me the next day and said it. You know,
I said, he said, am I ever ever going to
be allowed to come back? I don't think so, but.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
You know, said I did. I said something like, you
give it a year. He said, you're putting me on
the naughty step for a year. I mean, this became
a huge thing, you know, but that was the only time.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
But you know, those now.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
If they're rooted at all to the stuff, that's that's
the thing. Pillow Green.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
He was awful.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
But our passion at her at the time had begged
me to have him come to this thing, and I,
against my better judgment, I said, yes, he was just
he was disgusting.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yeah, we had.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
My favorite story about Manning is about Damien Hurst and
his best friend called Aunt in the like eighties or nineties.
They you know, the Groucho Club with the Grouchow Club,
and they they said, like at three in the morning,
they close everybody out, and Damian and his friend were
completely god knows on what. So they they found a
(09:33):
ladder and so they got a ladder from some place
in Soho, and they climbed up to the balcony on
the first floor and they broke a window and they
went inside, and then they threw up all over the
pool table. And then they went and they got some
more alcohol out of the out of the fridge and
they drank that, and then they went and they probably,
you know, they again threw up, and they took more
(09:55):
food in the kitchen, and then they just broken another
thing trying to get into it. And they fell asleep,
completely passed out on the floor. And the manager came
in the next morning, Marianne, and she looked at them
and she said, you know, I could have you arrested
for breaking it in would I could have you and you
know break you know, arrested and throw you out for
you know, trashing my property. I could have you arrested
(10:19):
because you fell asleep here.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
And that could have been a fire. I could have you,
she said. Instead, you are banned for twenty four hours.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Imagine estate bottled olive oil chosen and bottled for the
River Cafe, arriving at your door every month. Our subscription
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It's a perfect way to bring some River Cafe flavor
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(10:52):
for them with a gift. Visit our website shop the
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Speaker 3 (10:59):
Now do you want to read your recipe?
Speaker 4 (11:06):
Beef carpacco Serve six for the beef three pound filet
of beef, salt and black pepper. Trim every bit of
fat from the beef, leaving a small cylinder of tender meat.
Chill well using a razor sharp knife, slice the meat
paper thin. Arrange the slices of meat on six small
(11:28):
plates to cover the surface completely. Drizzle the sauce over
the meat in ribbons. Serve immediately with the sauce one
cup of homemade mayonnaise, a half teaspoon of Worcester sauce,
one teaspoon fresh lemon juice, two tablespoons milk, salt and pepper.
(11:51):
Put the mayonnaise in a bowl and whisk in the
Worcester sauce and lemon juice. Add in enough milk to
make a thin sauce that coats the back of a
wooden spoon, taste the sauce and it just the seasoning,
and add more Worcester sauce and or lemon juice to
taste there. You know, simple one take, one take, you know,
that's what they called me. They called me one take harder.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Okay, So would you have ever had beef carpaccio in
your house growing up?
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Do you remember when you had your first carpaccia?
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Oh that was definitely New York. So it was a
big It was a big dish.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
In the nineteen eighties, and like around the time when
like sambuca, Remember sambuca was a thing with three coffee beans.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
And anyways, in New York, I never.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Had yes, yes, it was so corny.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
But I never had raw food knowingly until I came
to New York in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
What did you have at home? What was So there's
you and your.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Brother, your brother, brother, and sister and my mother was
I would I can only say this now that she's
she's dead. She wasn't the greatest cook. And I grew
up in Ottawa, which is the capital city. Very cold,
I mean very very cold, and a lot of snow,
and there weren't a lot of fresh vegetables when I
was growing up. It's probably a bit like London at
(13:09):
the time.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
The train that's what we have to talk about.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Well, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
I think I've had one guest of one hundred and
fifty guests work.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
As alignment for the railroads.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Alignment was that dangerous? Is it dangerous?
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:22):
I guess it could be.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
I mean the mothers in those days and fathers and
especially my my friends, they send their kids out to
toughen them up out to west and to you know,
they don't they didn't use that with this expression then,
but to sort of character build.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
So I sent out. My aunt was a vice chairman
of the vice president of the railway, so she got
me this job. And the thing was, you got paid
two dollars and eighty cents an hour year nineteen seventy
two dollars.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
An hour two work as an alignment climbing the telegraph poles,
and two dollars and twenty cents an hour if you're
a groundsman. So I signed out to be a grounds
I got I'm not climbing telegraph poles. So we would
get out there and I wind up in a living
in a box car with eleven other man, most of
whom had criminal records, and they had a big sort
of poster up on the wall sign that showed what
(14:14):
the railroad would pay if you lost a certain limb.
So it would be seven hundred and fifty dollars for
a leg and two hundred and fifty dollars for an arm,
and like seventy five dollars for a foot, and these
are Canadian dollars. And then you teach you how to
climb out a telegraph pole that you have spikes in
your shoes that are sort of manacled to the bottom
(14:36):
part of your leg, and big gauntlet gloves, and you
climb up. You basically walk up the thing and you're
holding under the pole. There's no safety belt. And then
you had to carry wire up the pole and we
turn take off the old wire and this is like
thirty forty feet in the air, and then put the
other wire up and then refascen it to these glass conductors.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Did you get to college after that?
Speaker 1 (14:59):
So then I come back, I go to college.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
I was going to study political science in Ottawa, and
I'm walking by a place where the big glass office
with a bunch of people with typewriters and young people.
And I stopped and I asked them what they were doing,
and they said they were starting a magazine. So I said, oh,
can you use an extra hand? And they said, well, we're.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Looking for an art director. I said, I said, well
I can draw.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
What was a magazine called The Canadian Review, and it
was a political literary magazine. It did nothing but lose money.
It was it was sort of valiant, but not very good,
and that was put out by people who never worked
at a magazine before. But the magazine got me to
New York and it got me a job at Time
(15:47):
Magazine as a writer. And Time then was this sort
of citadel of journalistic power. It had like something like
eight hundred employees at Time. In those days they.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Bureaus all over the world.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
The London bureau chief lived as well as the American
ambassador almost here.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
And so I remember one. He was called Eric Amphitheatro.
Did you ever know him?
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Definitely he was.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
He was really elegant man.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
They all were all those.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Square ye, they lived well smart.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
Yeah, And Time then was being restocked by this huge
collection of brilliant twenty somethings and like Walter Isingson was there,
and Frank Rich and Michiko Kako Tani, who became the
chief book critical of the New York Times. My partner
at Airmail Alessander Stanley. This is nineteen seventy eight. My
(16:40):
partner at Spy magazine Kurt Anderson. My best friend Jim
Kelly who became the editor of Time, Maureen Daoud who's
the Pulitzer Prize winning columnists for the Time. So it
was just there's about twelve of us, and we became
mostly became lifelong friends.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
What did you do? What was your I was a writer,
so you would write.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
What I was aflow right, So I wrote business stories,
show business.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
Stories, and and just about you know, press stories, just
about anything they assigned.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
To me, which was the social life.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Social life was great.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
New York in the eighties.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Early This is like New York late seventies, early eighties.
It was still before AIDS, and I was you know,
you're young. All of a sudden, you have an expense account.
Nobody had ever had an expense account before, and so
you were eating out lunches, You're eating out dinners.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Okay, let's talk about them.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
So what lunches we were Okay, So most lunches there
was over in the West fifties in New York.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
They were like there's.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
A row of French restaurants all and there someone were
still there. There was one called Rennie Poujol, there was
one called and there was Yea, and there's one called
Shane Napoleon. And the Rennie Poujol was the Life magazine hangout,
and Shane Napoleon was the Time magazine hangout, and she
(17:59):
you could go and by this time I did drink,
and so you could go and have two people for
lunch with a bottle of wine for twenty five dollars
a frenchman.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
I mean it was red check your table class.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
It seemed really reasonable when you were there.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, even then it seemed reasonable.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
You got fifty dollars for your leg and.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Then you could you could expense the lunch.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Did you go to the Four Seasons?
Speaker 1 (18:24):
I went to the four Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
I went to the fourth season when I was at
Time and I thought, I for some reason, it was
like about eight months after I got in there and
a friend took me and I had I thought it
was going to be old fashioned, like the oak room
at the Plaza and I remember seeing it for the
first time and I felt, this feels a bit air porty,
like it like an air But then you know, after
sitting in there for ten to fifty minutes, you realize
(18:48):
the brilliance of the whole thing. It just it just
it just wasn't what I was expecting. But then I thought,
in time, it was the most beautiful restaurant I'd ever
been to.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Did you ever have to fire at not a time.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
I was too low to fire anybody.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
I was.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
I was the class that was fired. You not the
firing class.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
But did you just thinking about it, fired career people in.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
My whole career, and three and three of them in
one week?
Speaker 3 (19:17):
But not at lunch? Not I'm going to take you
out to lunch?
Speaker 1 (19:19):
No much to much.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Did you use place of restaurants to hire people?
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Well, I was strange enough.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
I hired uh three people as assistants who were waiters
for me.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Did you if you can if you can.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Handle you know, three tables of eight diars, you can
handle anything on earth?
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Those were the lunches? Were your friends? Did you all
kind of get together at night to people?
Speaker 4 (19:44):
Oh, we know, we had dinner alment together almost every
single night, and we expended those meals as well, often
on you know, really flimsy uh pretext.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
And then you know, at.
Speaker 4 (19:54):
There was I went up with a with a rock
at I know, dating it was wonderful, you know, I
mean New York City. You know, American women were more
interesting than something.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Then your twenties.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
I was in my late twenties. Yeah, I had a
great apartment in the village. I was paying two hundred
dollars a month. It had a tall ceilings like this
and a wall of leaded glass and opened up onto
a garden. And that'd be like five thousand and six
thousand dollars. Now it's like seventies, eighties, eighties.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
So then we went from Time.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
So then I went to the I was assigned to
Life magazine. They had restarted Life in the seventies. They
closed it for about six years and then restarted it.
So I was assigned to Life magazine and as a
writer editor. And I was happy to be there because
I you know, I had I think my at least
(20:51):
one child. By then, I needed a job and I
had an H one visa which was tied to employment.
So I if I lost my job, I'd lose my
right to be in the United States. So I went
to work at Life Magazine. I was sort of I
could do my job in five hours out of a week.
So Fred and I started plotting a magazine set in
(21:15):
New York. I like Private Eye, but you know sort
of gloss you're looking that called Spy Magazine. That would
be sort of fact based, heavily reported, but funny magazine
about New York and the people that were then sort
of the defining characters of New York, people like Donald
(21:37):
Trump and Leona Helmsley and anyway.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
And it was how.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Would you get your how would you get your story?
Speaker 1 (21:44):
It's in people how to report on stories?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
And then did they have interview?
Speaker 2 (21:48):
So tell me who just stop and talk about the
President of the United States?
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Well that was me I had done. I used to
do a lot of writing on the side to make
ends meet. And I had been assigned by G magazine
in nineteen eighty three to do a story in this
up and coming real estate developer who was quite sort
of flashy.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
In the tabloids.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
And his name was Donald Trump, and I'd sort of
read about him, but I really follow what he did.
But it was his first national exposures. So he allowed
me to.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
He allowed me, he asked me to hang around with
for three weeks.
Speaker 4 (22:21):
So I spent a lot of time with him, and
I wrote the story and he hated it because I
were very slightly flashy, had a sort of MoU stretched limousine,
and I pointed out this one comment that I pointed
out that his hands looked too.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Small for his body. He really hated them.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
So we get to Spy and we have funny, you know,
rude epithets for people, and trumb sepithet was we called
him a short finger at Bulgarian, which is sort of
caught on and stuck it me.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
He has been quite young at that time, was he
He's he's four years.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Older than I am.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
So this is in the eighties, this is.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
In the mid eighties. And so anyway, Spy was actually
a huge hit. But the trouble is, our whole money
was based on printing just twenty you know, enough for
twenty five thousand circulation. We had to start, you know,
spending a lot more money on printing, and so after
five years, we we'd run out of money and we
sold it to Charles Sacci and Johnny pagatza ah. And
(23:27):
then I wanted to start a newspaper, twice a week
newspaper that would come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
And this man called Arthur Carter, no relation to me.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
He had this very sleepy newspaper on the Upper eas
Side called the New York Observer. And I mean, he said,
once you learn the business doing my paper, So I said, okay.
So I worked out a plan, a six month, twelve month,
eighteen month plan of how it'd change it. I'd go
to work on this and within six months it had
become sort of a thing. People reading it it. It
was sort of the local newspaper for the Upper East
(23:59):
Side and Greenwich Village, and it was starting to get noticed,
and I I started sending copies to editors in Paris
and London and things like that. And then Cy Knwhause
who owned Random House and Connie nast A Contie has
a big new magazine published that published you know, the
(24:22):
New Yorker and Vogue and Vanity Fair and GQ and
Architectural Digest in any number of other magazines. He offered
me the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and I chose
the New Yorker. But then, because we'd made fun of
Vanity Fair at Spy magazine, it was a major.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Target for us.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
And so but then the day it was supposed to
be announced, it was switched and Tina Brown became the
editor the New Yorker and I became the editor of
Vanity Fair. And I was not the most popular candidate
because we'd made fun of them for the last five years.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
An open kitchen in the River Cafe means we as
chefs are able to talk to our guests dining in
the restaurant, And now we're bringing that same ethos to
our podcast, a question and answer episode with me and
our two executive chefs. Send a voice note with your
question to Questions at Rivercafe dot co dot uk and
(25:13):
you might just be our next great guest on Ruthie's
Table four. Did you ever do anything about going back?
Speaker 3 (25:25):
What to eat? And you? Did you have any articles
about food critic? Nope, get a food critic?
Speaker 1 (25:31):
No.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
I had a restaurant critic, Adrian gil food who did
He did a story about this restaurant. I think John
George Uh was the cooking part and Richard Meyer had
designed it. It was down and try back.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Oh yeah, and.
Speaker 4 (25:48):
This article, this review was the rudest restaurant review that
had appeared in New York in decades. I mean there
was news stories about it. There were longer than the review.
So Adrian biz Our, he probably did two. I think
we did two restaurant reviews the entire time. Was there
one on this restaurant that Richard Meyer had done and
one on Lammy Louis.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
I was going to say, Lammy Louis, I remember that and.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
He called it the world's worst restaurant.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Yes, yeah, and so yeah, yes, I don't agree with
you totally.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
I think it's the rudest restaurant in the world. You think, so, yeah, yeah,
I think terribly rude. And it's filled with Americans anyway, So.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
The other day how much Chicken and Scout. It's kind
of old school, but you know, there is I think
they did, Like a lot of Persians, they kind of
realize at some point now it is Yeah, I hope
he doesn't touch it. Yeah, but do you think do
you think when you go to a city where you
want to eat, if you're in Paris.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
That's the first thing I think, So you do.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
So this person who doesn't think about you.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Oh no, no, no, my life isn't No. It's funny.
During the pandemic we were in We're in Provence.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
About is at the house? I came to yes, yes, yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:04):
And so during the pandemic, and I actually loved the
quietness of it and just you know, the peacefulness of it.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
She could just read.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
But we had a beautiful market town right near It's
called Valbon, and it's a sixteenth century market town, not huge,
but built on a grid like Manhattan. And during the
pandemic we'd go in and walk around and there's no restaurant.
The restaurants couldn't open. There was one that filled the
entire square, and you just realized. I came back thinking that,
(27:34):
realizing that restaurants are the heart.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
And soul of a city.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
It's where you get engaged, it's where you break up,
it's where you celebrate a.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
New job.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
It's where you bemone having been fired. It's where you
gather with your friends. It's without you take restaurants out
of a city, and a city is dead.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
So when you go to a city, if you know
you're going, what do you do in terms of finding
out where to eat?
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Do you call friends?
Speaker 4 (27:58):
No, No, I have my my my restaurant list for
you know, Paris and London and Los Angeles.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Yeah, where would you go?
Speaker 2 (28:07):
If I'm Sam going to Gordon, it's Ruthie, I'm going
to la Where should I use?
Speaker 1 (28:11):
You know something?
Speaker 4 (28:12):
We have every meal at the Chateau Marmount. You stay
there and we just have all the meals there.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
So tell us about the Vanity Fair Oscar party.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Did you get.
Speaker 4 (28:21):
Involved in the menu everything and every single detail? We well,
we did it with Thomas Keller and he did these.
It's good and so it's a long night, so you
want to have some food that soaks up the alcohols.
He made these beautiful small lasagnas and we had but
we've also had an in and out stand to give
(28:43):
Hamburgers to people as well. You don't sit down and
you sit down for you sit down for three and
a half hours and watch the Oscars. So the one
hundred and fifty people come at the beginning of the
sit down and you have big screens all around, so
you watch the Oscars and these are older movie stars
or people who aren't not that year, and you have
artists and writers and you know, all the rest of
that sort of thing, and then you have then all
(29:06):
the then maybe three or four hundred and then maybe
five or six hundred over the course of the whole
evening come from the oscars, So.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Then it becomes just a giant milling party.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
And I believe or not, most movie stars don't know
each other because unless they worked on a movie together,
they don't know the other person. So they some of
them asked me to introduce them to somebody else. And
all parties in those days, big parties always had some
vip roped off area and I didn't want any of that.
I thought, we're gonna make it hard to get him.
But once you're in, you're everybody's treated the same, which
(29:39):
is well. We treated people really well, and we looked
after Like at the dinner, we had like, you know,
the Zippo lighters for everybody with saying from one of
them from a famous movie on it, and we had
our own ashtrays and they're all meant to be stolen.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
So what do do? The menu was talked to Thomas
Keller do it every year too?
Speaker 4 (29:55):
No, we I'm trying to. I can't remember who did it.
He did it for many years and I can't remember
who did it before him, but we would do tastings.
Oh yeah, tasting and just going through the design of
the table. And we had her own lamps made and night.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Well everyone like in yes.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
But I remember once said at one of the parties
we did at the during the Cannes Film Festival at
the hotel the cap and Sarah Marx, who organized these
things for us, she was the head organizer, she came
home and said, oh, you got to come quickly.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Isabelle Hubert is just I think she's dead. I said,
what do you mean. So we rush over and.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
They've got her lying down on a sofa and she's
the color of asphalt and she's not moving, and I think,
oh my god, she's dead. We've killed her, and I
said and I said, no, nothing kills past a party
fashion and the dead actors either. And so we were
standing there watching her. All of a sudden she moved
(30:58):
and I thought, oh, thank god. So very carefully the staff,
the hotel staff, got the call to the an ambulance,
got a gurney to come in through the kitchen very
quietly so no other guests would see, to get her
under the gurney and wheel her back out to the
back door off to the hospital and she's fine. And
what had happened was, you know, she had sort of
(31:18):
worn a very tight dress and didn't want to, you know,
have any bulges from eating, so she only drank and
had no food.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
Do you listen to people's dietary requirements?
Speaker 1 (31:34):
No, no, you can't.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
With one hundred c Most of this was before everybody
had a dietary problem, and we tried to avoid you know,
complicated things. But if you yeah, there's a vegetarian option,
and I mean if you wanted to, they could whip
up a salad if that's what you wanted. I mean,
you know we once you're a guest, we treat you
really well.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
We have gone through.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Actually, that thing that sticks with me is we're climbing
those poles in the train.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
But if you if you.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Climb the trains and it toughened you up, and you
want you know, Vanity Fair and my list of what
you've created, Spy and the Waverley And if you think
that that all this that you work hard, you need rest,
you need stimulation, you need fun, but you also need
comfort sometimes And so the question I always end this
(32:22):
podcast with and we're not going to end because we
could go on for another three hours. But if you
want comfort from food, would you say there's something that
you reach for when you need comfort?
Speaker 4 (32:32):
Well, I can't actually cook anything, but I think that
I love cheese.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
You know, a little slice of cheese can take the
edge off in the middle of the afternoon.
Speaker 4 (32:43):
My comfort go to at a restaurant in America is
a hamburger. I think it's almost the perfect dish. And
you can't have a successful restaurant in New York if
you're it has American food unless you make a great hamburger.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
So you can get them almostwhere.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
And you think you have the best burger in New York.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
No, no, no, no, no, we don't have the best thing.
We don't have the best anything in New York. But
the most restaurants who cover that level of food, they
all have great hammer You can't. It's it's pretty hard
to have a bad one. And there are many different
types of hamburgers now that they're like pizzas. Now they're
the people learn how to do them in a million
different ways. I actually had a great hamburger at the
(33:25):
park last night.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
That's great.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
The park that's a little sort of it's the very
American and the manual American slash Continental.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
What do you look for in a hamburger?
Speaker 4 (33:37):
And hamburger so not too big, people, some things make
them way too big. I think it's going to be,
you know, like an inch and a half thick and
a high quality either brioche or or a pretzel bahn.
And you know, a mixture meat not not cirlo. And
you wanted some chuck in there, some short ribbon there,
(33:57):
whatever they have, and I like it pretty playing with
cheez ketchup sometimes I like just pretty simple and maybe
a bit of mao oh.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
I don't have hamburgers, but we could go and have
some lunch.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Let's do that.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Thank you great, Thank you, Rithy.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership
with Montclair
Host
Ruth Rogers
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