TTT Interviewee: Michael Batterberry Session #1 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: May 8, 2009 Q: It’s May 8, 2009. This is Judith Weinraub, and I’m sitting with Michael Batterberry, the editor-in-chief and co-publisher of Food Arts magazine, in his office on Park Avenue South in Manhattan. Good afternoon. Batterberry: Good afternoon. Q: Nice to be with you. Could we start by your telling me a little something about when and where you were born, and your early experiences of childhood and your parents. Batterberry: Right. Well, I was born in England, of American parents, in 1932, in the north of England, where we spent most of the time, sometimes in London, but as a child, before the war the north of England was mainly my beat, and Scotland. My parents, as I say, were American. My father’s business was abroad. Both of my parents were deeply interested, had a great love of food. My father was from the north Midwest and my mother was from the north South, so they had different outlooks, but they were very copasetic. Part of this was expressed in forays to find the best of something, kind of foraging trips, which, as a small child, I would sometimes be included in, for example, going to the North Sea with my father to his favorite fisherman on this very slippery wharf, and of course it gets dark very early, and it had a great mystery, with these twinkling ladders and the bobbing boats. I remember my father bending over and smiling and picking up some boxes of kippers, because this one particular fisherman, he kippered herring better than anybody else, according to my father. So it was that kind of interest in food that was a sense of love of food. Q: Your father was a representative of a company? Batterberry: Proctor & Gamble. Yes, he did various things as a young man with Proctor & Gamble. They were sort of setting up. It was an American company taking over something called Thomas Headley, which had been an established similar company, an English equivalent. But because there was no commercial radio at that time, he had been one of the baby co-founders of soap opera back in the States as an advertising vehicle, so he would go— Q: The soap part. [laughs] Batterberry: The soap part. That was it, because Proctor & Gamble was the first sponsor, so that’s what stuck. But he realized that if he went to Luxembourg, there was Radio Luxembourg, which was national radio, and you could broadcast commercials. So you could also beam to England, so, in fact, he got around this by, oh, he hired people like the Ink Spots and Hildegarde, and Morton Downey was a good friend of his. So my parents sent time on the continent as well, both for pleasure and for business, and I would go along from time to time. So from the time I was really very small, I was going to Belgium and France, etc., and food was always a part of it, whatever children liked, waffles of Belgium or whatever. But I loved French food, and then, because we were Americans, we went back at least once a year on the ships, on the ocean liners, so you were exposed to—in those days it took, oh, I guess about seven or eight days to cross, particularly in the winter, the North Atlantic. So depending on the nationality of the ship, you were exposed to even more different kinds of food. Then my different sets of grandparents in the States represented other kinds of food. So all different kinds of food, I thought that’s what food was about. I never thought it was just one way of eating. Q: So on these ocean liners, you actually ate in proper liner style? Batterberry: Oh, absolutely. I was always allowed to order whatever I wanted, whether we were on ships or on trains, whatever. Well, when you’re very small, you know, sometimes I’d have supper in the stateroom, but I always had the full lunch with my parents in the dining saloon, salons. So that was, again, another exposure, and I loved it. I never thought of it as being adventurous. I just liked trying different things because my parents did. It was an adventure. There were certain things I didn’t like, like pistachio ice cream, I remember vividly, which they would always try to press on you. The ships thought the children loved ice cream molds, and it was always vanilla with raspberry and pistachios, which you would eat carefully around. But I loved things like the—and I still do, I have this emotional feeling about really good bouillon, and the idea of sitting out on deck and hear the tinkling of the cart with the hot urns of bouillon at eleven o’clock in the morning in these thick mugs. You’d be wrapped up with a plaid blanket on a deck chair. That was just grand. Q: Sounds terrific. Batterberry: If you were lucky, you saw a whale from time to time. Q: It’s a perfect childhood. That’s pretty good. When you were at home, did you eat out? Did somebody cook? Batterberry: Well, these were the days when many people had their cooks, domestic cooks. We always had a cook until I was about sixteen, I guess, and that was during the Depression, and so—I’m just adding up. In England there were at least five or six in-staff, in-house. So I loved being in the kitchen. Most English families did not let their children go into the kitchen, but that was okay. So Sarah, the cook, who was a Geordi, as they call people from North Umberland, would invite me into the kitchen, and I would have tea with the cook and our nanny and the maids. It all sounds very grand, but it was just very cozy. It was very nice. The wonderful thing about an English childhood is that social life begins very young. You’re expected to behave yourself. I mean, if you behave yourself, then you’re part of the scene, and say “Good evening” to the guests and so forth and then beat it. My parents had friends nearby with children my age, and we would go back and forth to each other’s houses for tea, and it was proper tea. We would sit down and Mrs. Fenwick—there was a family that owned the Fenwick’s department stores—I remember she would officiate at these kiddie teas and it was so much fun. You were expected to have conversation while the toast was being slathered with Lyles golden syrup and so forth. We had very watery tea, but the food was good. I think English food is much maligned, if you ate in people’s houses, which we did. It was only when you go out to Scotland, which we sometimes did too, Scottish friends, that you had absolutely horrible food for children. Ew. I remember fish with bones poached in milk, so it sort of curled out like little atolls of horror. You would see these lumps of fish sticking out. The Scotch have their reputation for being thrifty for good reason. I mean, if you didn’t finish it for supper, the children of the house would find it on their breakfast table the next day. Q: Yikes. So how old were you when you left England? Batterberry: Well, we left England as the war was breaking out in ’39, so I was only seven and a half at that point, but, you know, those are your formative years. I was English. I had an English accent, which I had to lose, which was kind of knocked out of me by my contemporaries in America. So I had two entirely different kinds of childhood, because when we returned to the States for good, we moved to Cincinnati, and my maternal grandmother was in Kentucky, and I loved staying—my sister and I—I have a sister four years younger. We would stay with my widowed grandmother in Kentucky from time to time, and it was a time when—I can’t believe it, it was like three centuries before. At the very back of her garden there was an alley that was like a country lane that was lined with—it was like an allée of poplars. It was absolutely lovely. But that’s where deliveries were made, and so the carts would come down, I mean, big, old-fashioned farmers’ carts either with ice for the ice chest or various food, and my grandmother would take me occasionally to the farmer’s market, which was very basic. All the horses and carriages would be drawn up side by side, and you bought from the farmers’ wagons. It was a peck of this or a half a peck of that. Q: Was it all produce or were the meats and fishes? Batterberry: There were meats and fishes, but I think my grandmother was leery of buying meat in an open market. She was very hygiene-conscious. I mean, everything was washed, washed afterwards, but it was mainly runner beans and tomatoes and southern things that are essentials. But you would see this occasional street vendor selling salt-rising bread and some of the other old-fashioned things. You had wonderful smells. I don’t know why, the markets always smelled of celery. Celery seemed to be the pervasive— Q: Could be worse. Batterberry: But that was the pervasive scent. I remember my grandmother saying with—she was very gentle, very soft-spoken, lovely southern lady. However, her face would freeze if we were going out for lunch someplace, probably a restaurant or café in nature, and she would order chicken salad, and she would put her fork down and say, “There’s veal in this chicken salad.” Q: Quite a palate. Batterberry: Because in those days veal was a filler. I mean, no, that was a deception. It was so much cheaper. There was something in Cincinnati that my friends who no longer live there, that we would always sort of laugh about, but, in fact, it was quite good, it was called city chicken, and the city chicken was sold generally by the German butchers, of which there were many in Cincinnati, really good ones. It was a little skewer, a wooden skewer, with cubes, chunky cubes of pork and veal that was rolled lightly in cornmeal, I think, and then this would be sautéed. So it was a southern kabob. It was called city chicken. Cincinnati had not so many things that were specifically Cincinnati, because if it was, it was usually German. There were excellent German bakers, and sort of German cum southern, with wonderful rolls that you would order in advance for parties and so forth. There was, of course, Cincinnati chili, which, to the horror of outlanders, was served as a spaghetti, Skyline chili. Q: What were they, Cincinnati and Skyline chili? Batterberry: Well, Skyline chili was American chili. There were red beans and ground beef and cumin and chili powder, onions, garlic, etc. But it always had to—it was like going into a taverna restaurant in Greece, where there’s always a slick of orange grease on top of the pot in the kitchen. There was always this—it had to. It was mandatory that there was this kind of floating residue of orange-colored slick—which was, in fact, was very good. I mean, when you have the raging appetite of a twelve-year-old, you know, that was great. Oysters, I mean even that far inland, were very common, fried oysters and claims and so forth in the restaurants. Later, when I was about—this is skipping over, because we left Cincinnati when I was about eleven, and we came east to Greenwich, Connecticut, and to New York, and, of course, that did it for me, I mean, New York was it. Again, my parents—this is during the war—my parents took us to the restaurants that were open then, whether it was French bistros or Chinese or whatever. We did the works. So we even expanded our adventures further. Q: Your father was still working for Proctor & Gamble? Batterberry: No. My father then became—he was lured away by Madison Avenue. My father had a reputation. Numbers of people said that he was—he really was famous on Madison Avenue for being the greatest copy critic there was, and he also hired and fired the agencies for Proctor & Gamble. Essentially, when he was in New York it was on the advertising side. He was extremely sociable. He was a lot of fun, very, very—sort of a volcanic figure and charismatic, which was one of the reasons, of course, that Madison Avenue had wooed him. But then he discovered, to his dismay, how much borderline deceit [was involved], as he put it—well, he said, “They tell so many lies.” So he had major jobs at two major agencies and then retreated, because Proctor & Gamble asked him to come back, which he did. Q: Where did you live? Batterberry: In New York? Q: Yes. Batterberry: We lived on Park Avenue at 84th Street, so we were just two blocks from 86th Street in Yorkville, which was very dramatic in those days because during the war that’s where, as you know, it really happened, they broke up some Bundt meetings in some of the German restaurants on 86th Street. It was—what are they called—the Sixth Column, the Fifth Column, Sixth Column, what have you. But there again, there were all of these—it was a kind of hub of German food. It was before the Hungarians moved—that was a bit later—moved in, but nevertheless, there were some dinky French restaurants, dinky Chinese, and so forth, but my parents didn’t go there. We went there with my sister’s nanny, you know, when my parents were out. We had a wonderful African American cook at that point, whose name was Bernice Frye, appropriately. She was from Kentucky too, and she came with us when we moved to New York, and was a brilliant baker, wonderful meringue pies of all sorts and ethereal biscuits. We had biscuits six times a week--that was just commonplace—a silver bread basket full of hot biscuits by Bernice. Q: So your standards and expectations of food were really pretty high. Batterberry: Yes, because both of my parents were very critical to her. They weren’t critical to the point that they spoiled the mood. They did it evenly, but if it wasn’t what it was meant to be, one of my father’s most repeated expressions was, “You have to get it right. It has to be right.” Did they get it right? No. Did they get it right? Yes. And being Madison Avenue, of course, he was a denizen, with his cronies, at places like 21. I went to 21 the first time “as a man” at the age of, I think, fifteen or sixteen. My father took me along with Milton Biow, who had the Biow Agency. Actually, it turns out he was Matthew Broderick’s grandfather, and he was a good friend of my father’s. We went by Milton’s very elegant offices, and as we stopped and he said, “Bill,” my father, “shake hands with Eddie Cantor,” and there was Eddie Cantor, who had just returned from Israel when Israel had just become Israel. And the four of us walked over to 21. I mean, to have your first time at 21, this was perfect, and there we were joined by Abel Green, who was the editor-in-chief of Variety. So we were given the sort of table that was reserved for the Krindler’s cream, and I didn’t realize it at the time. I just thought this was “We’re sitting in the dining room instead of the bar. Why?” Again, my father always knew what to order in each of these places. I think probably his favorite restaurant in New York at that time was The Brussels, which was like being inside a cello. It was just this beautiful golden wooden-paneled restaurant, with Belgian/French food. It was the sort of place that had a special drawer for ripening pears for the cheese, and I think it was lined with velvet. There were these half cups that the pears were turned in until they met perfection. It was like the stories about the early shahs of Persia--all of them melon fanatics—that’s the national trade—who would be wakened by the melon sniffer in the middle of the night when the melon had reached its absolute perfect moment. Well, The Brussels was that way about pears. L’Armorique, which was the first restaurant that I experienced where the chef came out and spoke to—but he kept his toke on, and he was, you know, a big, rough—I mean, not rough, robust, red-faced French chef, and did wonderful lobster à l’Americaine, and that, too, was one of my father’s favorites. The first time I ever saw a display kitchen was the Café Chambord, which was on Third Avenue underneath the EL. The elevated train was still up then. It was the quintessential bistro with fine bentwood chairs, stereotypical but really good. The only thing that wasn’t stereotypical was that there was plate glass in one of the walls, through which you saw these immaculate chefs, starched, and these gleaming copper pans, this great batterie de cuisine hanging over their heads, and that was a treat because it was deceptively simple-looking, when, in fact, I believe it was one of the two most expensive restaurants in New York, that and Le Pavillon at that time. Q: You were going to school in New York, obviously. Batterberry: Yes. I went to school in New York at Browning, but I later I used to—how did this happen? I was in school and I went to boarding school for a year in Newport at St. George’s, and I joined my father then and we—I keep telling you about my father. My mother was often there, too, and I would do different kinds of things with my mother. But I would go from prep school to meet him in New York from time to time, and restaurants were always in the mix. The thing that was wonderful about my parents’ taste in restaurants was that it didn’t matter what level it was. It could be the absolute simple, most funky, as long as the food was great. If they got it right, if it was what it was and it had soul and it had some real distinction, even if it was—well, there weren’t barbecue shacks in New York at that time, there was barbecue out in the Midwest. And then we’d go to Chinatown. And I would go to Chinatown with a couple of contemporaries. But then when we went back to Cincinnati—I’m leaping around here. Well, I was in Cincinnati for about three years in my teens, and I have a circle of dear friends, girls and boys, some of whom I’d known when I was little, and most of them have gone on to—it was a very interesting group. A couple of them stayed in Cincinnati, but most of them didn’t. There weren’t that many of us, I think maybe seven or eight was our largest circle, but we started something called—because Gourmet magazine set the standard for good food magazines at that time, and each of our mothers subscribed to Gourmet magazine. Yes, we started a Gourmet Club. Q: And you were teenagers? Batterberry: Yes. We were about fourteen. Well, you can imagine what the range in Cincinnati was [unclear] and so forth, there were some good restaurants, but it was mainly clubs that people went to in those days, as many people did in the Midwest and the South, rather than restaurants. But we would go downtown Cincinnati and sometimes we’d go to the courthouse and watch trials for a while, and then have lunch, and we found a Peruvian little hole in the wall with a certain maté, and we went to Italian and German, of course. Grammers, which was the great downtown, tiled wall, German restaurant that had Schmierkase on the table when you sat down, and fragrant rye bread that had just been baked hours before, that you’d fall upon. If you really wanted to commit aesthetic assault, you’d order the limburger sandwich with onions, you know, and then nobody could get near you for the rest of the day. We boys thought that that was some kind of test of fire. Q: What prompted the move to Venezuela? Batterberry: My father set up Proctor & Gamble in South America. Q: You were about how old at that point? Batterberry: I was twenty at that point. I had started going to art school while I was going to school at the—by the time I was twelve I had been out at the Art Students League of New York, and I was very serious about painting and drawing, and I continued. They had extremely good teachers at the Art Academy in Cincinnati. Cincinnati was quite artistic. They had a good symphony and good art museum and so forth. I started with Louis Bouché and Albers there. While I was going to art school one year there, almost full-time, I went to the University of Cincinnati and took special courses. As a special student, they allowed me to do that, to take literature and Greek drama, etc., play production, where my great friend, whom I just saw last night after a very long time, Douglas Cramer, who went on to be Aaron Spelling’s partner and produced Dynasty and so forth, anyway, we were in play production class together then, and still we always, even with Doug and that circle of friends, we were always checking out where the best beer on draft was, where the best fried shrimp in the basket and so forth. You just didn’t go and have it; you made it an effort. So we went to Venezuela. Q: This is the whole family? Batterberry: Yes. They essentially went to live there fairly permanently, but they kept, obviously, the house in the States. My father and mother said, “Do you want to come down and spend a couple of months painting?” At that point I had gone to Carnegie Tech and I was finished with my college days, so I went to Caracas, which he chose as the headquarters, and there was so much to do. I mean, you were brainwashed in the States. At that point if you were young and in your teens looking to, “What am I going to do with my life?” My father would also say that he was supportive of my painting but, “What are you going do to make a living doing this?” Suddenly, I found in Caracas that if you could do something well, there was a market for you, because there was just so much money. It was a boom town. Perez Jimenez was the dictator, and the city was growing, just yeastily. My father, again, as he loved characters and fun and food, he found this Italian restaurant and restaurateur named Tony Grandi, who had had Tony’s Caprice in New York and for various reasons had moved on through—he’d been invited by Trujillo’s daughter to run a club for them in the Dominican Republic that was a disaster. Then he went to Haiti, and one my favorite restaurant horror stories, Tony Grandi and his soi disant wife, who was a woman older than he, very glamorous, very intelligent, who was sort of selling the last of her emeralds to propel them around the world, they went to something called The Pechoir, which was in Haiti. It was over above Petionville, and it was the place of choice for the Haitians, for the rich Haitians, to go for this Sunday brunch that looked like the cliché cruise line pictures of those days with these piles of food, tropical this and that, and salads and lobsters and what have you, and the whole thing overseen by a French chef. Well, Tony was hired to be the general manager and sort of beef things up, and Giulianna, his consort, had two young Haitian houseboys sort of looking after their bungalow. The boys were maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. This French chef was mean, notoriously mean to the staff, and one Sunday all of these dressed-up, dressy Haitians arrived in their cars with their chauffeurs and so forth, and they stood in line in their stiff organdies, and were going down to the buffet table, this mile-long buffet table, and suddenly people were screaming and retching and rushing out. “God, what is going on here?” Tony went rushing in, and in between the piles of shrimp and pineapples and so forth was the head of the chef, with his toke on, that had been removed from the rest of him and put, with deep irony, in the middle this display of food. So the police arrived. Q: Haiti was in turmoil. Batterberry: Yes. So the police arrived and questioned everybody, and it was agreed that the people to whom he’d been the meanest were these two young boys. So they said, “All right, you come in here.” And Giulianna, being very Italian and maternal, said, “No, no, no. These poor garçons.” And they said, “All right, sit down and put your hands on your head and raise your feet from the floor.” And she said, “No, no, La torture, la torture. No, no. What are you doing to them?” Well, in fact, in Haiti if you put your hands on your head and you raise your feet from the floor, and you tell a lie, you become a sort of quasi zombie. Your spirit is trapped in there in this maligned falsehood. So they had to announce that, yes, they had indeed removed the head of the chef. It was sort of like a Berlitz lesson. “Did you cut the head of the chef and put it on the table?” “Yes.” Q: Let me back you up. You were visiting then in Haiti? Batterberry: No, no. I went to Haiti later with Katherine Dunham. Q: I see. This story then— Batterberry: This was my introduction to what could happen in the Tropics. Q: I see. Batterberry: So, needless to say, they left rather abruptly, Tony and Giulianna, and went to Caracas, where he found restaurant space in a building in a kind of—it wasn’t downtown and it wasn’t in the suburbs. It was half in between, in a hotel owned by an Italian called the Hotel Quasimodo, and Tony immediately set about with Giulianna. Giulianna was a great designer. They transformed this place and they made it practically overnight the number one restaurant in Caracas. Well, Tony needed some money, so my father and some of his friends loaned him some money to sort of keep the cash flow going until he was on his feet. I got along extremely well. I had my twenty-first birthday at Tony’s restaurant. Some friends from the States gave a nice party for me there, and the food was like the crêpes colony. It was seafood crêpes and excellent Italian food and Italian wine, and fun, so much fun. The musicians were in a little bandstand in a trio always playing, and everybody loved it. But Tony decided he would expand. So one night I was invited to join in, being then twenty-one, to hammer through the walls, and we did this in an improvisatory way, to the degree that we found ourselves standing in the back alley. Anyhow, he went upstairs and expanded the restaurant there, and I did the murals. This was my first professional brush with a restaurant. And on the strength of my doing the murals in the new rooms, Giulianna asked me to start a design agency with her, which was an enormously educational experience. We designed the Alfa Romeo show room and I did the murals there, and we designed furniture, and then I designed jewelry for Cartier because there were all these semi-precious stones flying around for nothing, and then I designed floats for the carnival parades. So I just found a lot of work, and I made more money than I ever dreamed of making at the age. So that by the time I was twenty-three, one night in my parents’ garden, they were giving a big party and Tony was doing the catering, and he sort of sidled over to me and he said, “I’m going to Europe. I’m going to Spain and Italy to buy things for the new restaurant. Why don’t you come with me and stay there.”
 I said, “Why should I do that?” He said, “Because you’ve been here two years now, and if you stay here longer, you’re going to end up marrying a Venezuelan and then you’ll never leave here.” Well, I thought that was sort of insulting to Venezuela, but nevertheless, I was very tempted because there were so many Italians in Caracas at that time. I had a lot of Italian friends and some introductions, so I went, and that was it, and then I moved to Rome. In Rome I painted and exhibited and wrote. At one point I was ghostwriting Gloria Swanson’s column for her, because we had become friends. Q: Where was her column? Batterberry: It was syndicated. She had it for a couple of years at that point. She was making a movie called My Son Nero, Il Mio Figlio Neroni, with Alberto Sordi and Vittorio De Sica and Brigitte Bardot. Q: Oh, my goodness. Batterberry: A movie that we don’t see often repeated. In any case, my education was—I mean, had I not lived in Rome, because in Rome—and I could speak enough Italian because I had spoken Spanish pretty well—you met everybody. In the winter it turned into a small village. I always went to Bricktop’s nightclub because Bricktop’s was the best on Via Veneto, and we became friends. Bricktop had been in Paris in the 1920s. She was a great friend of the Fitzgeralds, and she taught the Prince of Wales the Charleston and so forth, and “Miss Otis Regrets” was written for her by Cole Porter. I think I’ve heard “Miss Otis Regrets” more than any human. Anyway, she had this little nightclub on the Via Veneto that was very twinkly, and everybody went. The movie stars, the Italians, everybody went, and there was a cabaret. One night she invited me to a party at her house, her apartment, and she had discovered black-eyed peas were available in Italy, to her joy, and there was ribs and black-eyed peas and salad, and huge glass tumblers full of Jack Daniels, and the piano, and people were playing and singing. So I was singing, and she said, “Oh, baby, you’ve got to come and sing at Bricktops.” I said, “No, no, no.” I’d been in the theater department at Carnegie Tech, but majoring in playwriting and design, but you had to take acting as part of the curriculum. So I had performed a bit, and I said, “All right. I’ll come and sing for a weekend.” She said, “No, if you don’t sing for two weeks, you’ll never know whether you can do it or not.” So I did it for two weeks, and I was there for fourteen months, and eventually I signed with Leonard Stillman for New Faces. He came there. Q: That’s amazing. You did sets or— Batterberry: I did sets for amateur productions. Q: No. I mean in the nightclub. Batterberry: Yes. I did. And “Mack the Knife” was my theme song, and I say with humility that Bobby Darren’s manager stole, not my arrangement, but the tempo. He heard it. I sang it in a kind of savage way, in the first person, as if I were “Mack the Knife.” But then I sang in Spanish and French, and I had a friend who’s a composer who set some Thomas Hardy poems to English folksongs. It was very, very strange, and I had an Arabic song that was very dramatic with drums and so forth. Rather than a singer, I’d be called today, you know, a performance artist. Q: Oh, how incredible. Now, you were cooking for yourself or going out to eat? Batterberry: Wherever I went, I cooked. I loved cooking from the time—you know, I loved watching Sarah when I was really little in England, and Bernice used to let me into the kitchen to watch her, and then whatever I did, she would say, “Ain’t that pitiful.” [laughter] But I had some rudimentary lessons with her, but I picked it up as we went, and then in Caracas, Giulianna used to come over to my parents’ house, and she was a wonderful hostess and she taught me how to make—she made the best risotto of all time. The secret was a little bit of brandy at the last. Oh, and what I did with Tony—I forgot this—was Tony was commissioned by the local Taste de Vin Society in Caracas, of the certain Venezuelan grandees, to stage a special meal, a wine pairing dinner with all indigenous foods. So Tony didn’t have a car. I did. So I drove Tony off, and we went into the hinterland and we found trout streams, and we even found a place that sold a tapir, which ended up being cooked, and we found wild fennel and various things. So that was a real foraging safari, and that dinner was a triumph for Tony. He was enormously funny, witty, great company. I was given the commission, at the age of twenty-two, to remodel a Hotel Waldorf, which was a twenty-four bedroom hotel that had fallen into a state of disrepair. Q: In Caracas? Batterberry: In Caracas, that had been taken over by the American Club. They wanted to move into larger quarters. So I did the out front and designed the bar, including an iron chandelier which I had been unduly influenced by at the St. Regis at the King Cole Bar. So I thought, “Aha! I will amaze Caracas by having this created.” I knew an iron monger, a blacksmith, a Spanish blacksmith, with the leather apron and the bellows and the so forth. He was one of these figures straight out of Velasquez, and I went to him and said, “Maestro, I really want this,” and I sketched the chandelier, and he made it in iron. I drew it in feet and he made it in meters, so that caused something of a commotion in the bar, and it was a great feat of engineering to keep it up there over the bar at the American Club. But Tony did the food, and I did, as I said, the out front and designed the furniture, and that was one my last experiences with Tony in restaurants. Q: Did he stay in Rome? Batterberry: No, no. Well, as a matter of fact, he never made it to Rome, because we went to Madrid, where we immediately met all kinds of friends. It was during the week of San Isidro and we had a great time, and then we went to El Chicote, the great bar in Madrid, and then we went to this wonderful restaurant with friends, the Groghans, and friends of my parents’. It was the damndest restaurant. Nobody in Madrid now remembers it, I guess. I’m of that age. I was twenty-two. You ate dinner, and between courses there was a door through which you went, and you found yourself in a balcony over a jai lai court, and “pop, pop, pop,” and you placed your bets and you drank. Q: Oh my. Batterberry: Vino tinto, vino tinto, and then you went back in for the next course to the relative peace of the restaurant. So we went on to Rome, and we had found in our forays, when he was buying stuff for the new restaurant in Caracas, which was really huge, there was some very inexpensive terrific pigskin luggage, and everything in Spain was cheap in those days. We each, we said, “Can you believe these prices?” So we each bought this sort of matched set—it was absurd—for very little. So we arrived at the Rome airport and Giulianna’s son, who was a doctor, had come to greet us, his soi disant son-in-law, and suddenly some plain-clothed policeman came and took Tony into a side chamber, and I heard these yells and shouts in Italian. Q: Oh dear. Batterberry: In Capri, where he had met Giulianna, he had owned a nightclub restaurant, which was very well known, called Numero Due, and one night someone had come in drunk and Tony asked him to leave, and he took a swing at Tony, and Tony knocked him down, and it turned out he was a policeman. So Tony’s name had been on the books all this time. So he was escorted out of the country and he had to go to Switzerland. Then I went up to Switzerland to see what on earth was going on, and met him with his parents. He was originally from Lake Como. And that was the last time I really ever saw him. Q: And you went back to Rome at that point? Batterberry: I went back to Rome. Well, I had just arrived in Rome, because I went with his son-in-law into Rome and proceeded to have a different life there. At first I lived alone. They had wonderful pensiones, and this was during the height of the Dolce Vita, and then I made friends, and I shared an apartment with two Italian friends, right over between Trevi Fountain and the Quirinale, and on the top floor of the palazzo, which was absolutely great. There was a Neapolitan pizzeria, and you could let down a basket, because it was on the fourth floor, and they’d put the pizza in and we’d put the money in. Then I shared an apartment with a friend who became one of my closest friends in life. We were each other’s best men at our weddings, Francesco Ghedini, who was a journalist from Bologna, who knew an—well, if your Bolognese, you know about food, and he knew an enormous amount about food. I had dear friends my own age, mainly Italian, and the Italian habit was of the men and women, young women, would get together, oh, at least four or five times a week. So, okay, “Dove andiamo sta stasera?” “Where are we going tonight, which trattoria?” And then started arguing about which trattoria. “No, no, no. This one is the best because the tortellini there.” “No, no, no.” So you have another drink, and then you have this absurd conversation. It was always the same, and quite frequently you’d be going on so long, you got there, they would have put the chairs on top of the table. In those days it was kind of topsy turvy. Chicken was the most expensive thing on the menu, and pollo a diavolo was one of the specials, and pigeon, grilled pigeon and so forth. I had another wonderful experience, a meal that I’ve written about, in that I met Eugene Walter, who was a wonderful character, who was a poet and later a great food writer. He wrote the Time Life book on southern food, and he was the editor of Botteghe Oscure, the literary review. He was from Mobile, Alabama, and he was one of the founders of Paris Review, one of the founding editors, and he was going to interview Baroness Blixen, Isak Dinesen, who was coming to Rome. I had done a series of paintings that were rather eerie in a way, sort of sinister, in the mood of the Seven Gothic tales, and he said, “You’ve got to show these to Baroness Blixen.” I said, “I can’t believe this.” And he said, “Why don’t you do her portrait for my interview for the Paris Review, for the Art of Fiction series.” So we went to meet Baroness Blixen, who was a formidable figure [wearing a deep cloche, so] you could barely see her in profile, and she wheeled at me, and she said, “Are you going to do my portrait?” And I said, “I’d like to very much.” And she said, “Then you better sit over there where you can see me.” So she invited me to lunch the next day, and there was a French woman who was a lion hunter, a literary lion hunter, who thought that she had Baroness Blixen all to herself, ha, ha. Well, she had a little Fiat, and I will never forget this poor woman’s face when Baroness Blixen introduced me and said, “This is my new friend, Michael Batterberry, and I have invited him to join us for lunch,” knowing full well that this poor French woman was going to pay for it, and so the three of us bounced off in a car to the Via Appia Antica, where the Baroness Blixen had heard about a restaurant where they did this spectacular—she didn’t talk about food that much because she was anorectic, but she knew food absolutely, if you read her various letters and diaries as well as her stories. There was this place. It was called La Cisterna, I think. In any case, it was so beautiful. It was overlooking a field of ruins out at the Old Appian Way, and we sat on this terrace under roses the size of baby’s heads, bobbing above us. It was in May. The waiters came rushing forward like centurions, because she was one of those presences you didn’t have to know who she was, you knew she was, and she said, “We would like the chicken.” And the chicken was—well, essentially three or four of these waiters in their brilliantined black hair and those snappy white jackets came with these branches of freshly torn laurel, bay leaves, big branches of them, and they crossed them like swords. And another one took cheap brandy, Italian brandy, poured it all over the leaves and set it on fire so there was this great gust of smoke and perfume, and they held seven, eight cooked chickens on long prongs over this smoke of the burning laurel leaves. And so she sat in the middle of it like the oracle of Delphi, you know, with the smoke curling around the end of her cigarettes, and that was probably of all the wonderful meals I had in Rome the most memorable. Q: I can see why. How long did you stay there? Batterberry: Where? Q: In Rome. Batterberry: In Rome? I was there for several years. I don’t know, there was a kind of dribbling exodus of different friends. You know, you sort of sensed that an era was coming to an end. My parents, particularly my mother, said she found it extremely irritating when her good English friends would say, “Well, darling, because you’re not like an American.” Whatever that meant. I found many of my Italians saying to me, “No si come un americano,” you’re not like them, precisely word for word, I mean, in a different language. And I wondered, I thought, “You know, all right, what am I?” I’m not English anymore. I’m certainly an American more than anything, but I was losing that. So I decided, when Leonard Stillman asked me to be in New Faces, I thought, “Okay. This is it. This is the call.” I was never in it because he never got the money together in time, and by that time I saw what show business was like in this country. It was quite different from Italy. So I moved on. Q: You mean from show business? Batterberry: Yes. Well, later on I—no, not completely. I co-produced and directed a musical review off Broadway, in which the unknown, completely unknown, Linda Lavin was in, and Barry Dennen, and we were struck by equity, equity was striking everybody, this is just not meant to be. Why am I even thinking about this? Q: When you came to New York, how did you think you were going to make a living? Batterberry: Painting. Painting. Writing. I did numbers of things. Actually, one of the things I did was I did a few illustrations for Gourmet. I did special windows for Gene Moore at Bonwit Teller’s once a year they sealed off the windows to refurbish them, and behind, and so I would paint what was on the glass, different things. I did this review, etc. Then Ariane and I met, and— Q: Tell me where you met. Batterberry: We met at the St. Regis Roof at a party that had been organized by a Croatian friend of ours, who was the baby chief designer for Cassini. She was a fashion designer, and she had this club that she called the Renaissance Club, and the idea was she would get young people who were creative, and—well, what we were meant to do, I’m not quite sure, but nevertheless, having a black-tie dinner dance was one of them. Dance actually, with a little bit of food. Ariane and I met, but we were each with another date at that point, and then we were brought together by another mutual friend and we became friends first. Ariane had gone to Cambridge, she’s from New York, but Ariane had gone—after Barnard she went to Cambridge, and had loved England and stayed there for a while. One of her friends was Hugh Johnson, and his first book, his first wine book had come out, and we went to a party for Hugh at Jim Beard’s house. Q: Now, at that point were you married? Batterberry: No. No, no, no, we were just friends. Again, in a circle of friends, my sister included— Q: And the party was for Hugh Johnson? Batterberry: Well, the one at Jim Beard’s was. Yes, it was for his book. It was for Simon & Schuster. It was for the book launch of wine, his first book on wine, and that’s when we first met Jim Beard. Obviously, I knew all about him. Again, my parents had a couple of his books and so forth. I think my father had even tried at some point, toyed with the idea of trying to get him to—my father had done something with Duncan Hines that got Duncan Hines involved & Proctor and Gamble, and he thought maybe James Beard would—but that didn’t pan out. So we met Jim, and then Ariane and Hugh Johnson and I decided that we would write a book together on the history of restaurants. We were that young. It was preposterous, you know, what an undertaking. So Ariane and I would do it in the States, and Hugh would go back to England and do his part there, in theory. Then we began looking around, and we found an extraordinary collection that nobody had ever gone through in the New York Historical Society. We thought, “Well, nobody has really done a social history of eating and drinking in New York, the history of New York seen through eating and drinking. Why don’t we do that.” Ariane had already published two books with Pantheon at that point. One was a history of art for school ages that she did with her friend Carter Brown before he became the director. He was low man on the totem pole with Mr. Walker, and he supplied her with the plates from the National Gallery, which made it affordable for schools, and then she wrote a biography of Beaumarche, which was also published by Pantheon. So they loved her at Pantheon, and they said, “Fine. Sure. Do a book,” to the two of us. Q: So she was an established writer? Batterberry: Yes. And I had never written a book. I had written numbers of articles for various things, but it was on the strength of her relationship with Pantheon that we got a contract with Fabio Cohen, who was a very good editor there. By the time we finished the book, New York was in the basement, and the sales department said, “Well, nobody is going to buy a book about New York,” that was it. Q: What year was this? Batterberry: We married in ’68, so we must have started it in late ’65. We worked a couple years on it, and then we were sort of dashed, to put it mildly. They said, “It’s a nice manuscript, but the sales department won’t do anything about it.” So we figured, look, we’d written a book together, and realized we loved each other, so we got married. Q: Reasonable. Batterberry: Reasonable. And we were offered a contract by McGraw Hill. The initial one was to edit with summary writing, a ten-volume history of art, and once we got into it, we realized it was so full of errors that we had to write from scratch. So that was something that occupied us for several years. Q: And these were big books or medium-sized or what? Batterberry: Again, sort of junior college level, kind of survey books. I’m trying to think how many words they were, each one. Q: Because you did a lot of them. Batterberry: Yes. I can show you one next time. And then we did ten, and then four of them came out in paperback. Q: Yes. What I’m looking at here it says, Roman Art, Greek and Roman Art, High Renaissance, Chinese and Oriental, Children’s Homage to Picasso. Batterberry: That was another thing, that was for Harry Abrams. Q: I see. What happened to On the Town in New York? Batterberry: On the Town in New York, it took us another couple of years to find a publisher after that, and Burroughs Mitchell, who was the editor-in-chief of Scribner’s, was a New York buff, and he took it on. So that’s how it finally came to light in 1973. Q: Now, meanwhile had you kept up with Jim Beard at all? Or how did that work? Batterberry: Yes. Q: You met him first at that party, you taught a class for him later on, so you must have in some way or other— Batterberry: We met again socially, and he invited us for a meal at his house and we had such a good time, because, you know, Jim was interested in so many different things. He was interested in Ariane and me in different ways, because Ariane for her knowledge of—Ariane has her master’s in classics. And he liked artists. He liked the idea that I was a painter as well as a writer at that point, because he had several painter friends, and one of them was a woman by the name of Antoinette Schulte, who painted the portrait of him that’s over the mantelpiece in the Beard House, who was an American expatriate in Paris, and she had finally moved. She was Jim’s age. She moved back to New York. They were close. In any case, so we invited him, you know, we reciprocated, and suddenly this friendship started, and he liked the way I cooked to the degree that—I think he may have done it intentionally just to infuriate Jane Montant at Gourmet—he said that I was the best cook outside of a professional kitchen in the country. Q: That’s pretty good. To whom did he say that? Batterberry: He said it to several people, and he said it to Jane Montant; she was the editor of Gourmet. Q: So you were cooking rather than Ariane? Batterberry: Yes. Ariane doesn’t cook. It works out very well. Ariane knows food very well and appreciates food, so I cook for Ariane. Q: It’s pretty good. Batterberry: And cook for friends. Not so much anymore, unfortunately. Q: Tell me what he liked about your cooking. Batterberry: A couple of things. The fact that, I mean, now it’s so commonplace, but that I mixed cuisines without confusion. For example, if I did a bollito misto I might even have a Chinese black bean sauce with it as well, some things that really worked. Actually, I have something that they sent me from the Beard House, which was an interview—do you have those—in which he speaks about people—he hated when people said, “Oh, I could never cook for you.” Q: No, I don’t know that. Batterberry: I can give you a copy of that. He cited us as an example of the sort of dinner that he liked, because it wasn’t too fussy and there weren’t too many things and it was interesting and so forth. And he said, “My good friends, the Batterberrys,” and this was a long time ago. It was an interview, I don’t know, they found on tape or whatever, but they transcribed it. Because I know we were good friends by 1973, because that’s when On the Town in New York finally came out. We had met an extremely bright young, young woman, who was PR and marketing for Bloomingdale’s, and we met her at some charity event, and we fell to talking about—she asked what we were doing, and we said, “Well, we have this book that’s coming out.” And she said, “Oh, Bloomingdale’s has got to give the launch party.” So we said, “Fine.” Q: Nice big space. Batterberry: Yes, indeed. And Bloomingdale’s was sort of the place to have a party. It was, looking back, rather bizarre, but it was on, I guess, the top floor, the floor with the bookshop in it as well. It was the first party to have food stations with a lot of different restaurants. Jim Beard came; Mayor Lindsay came; Bricktop was in town; Geoffrey Holder; [unclear]. Geoffrey is another old, dear friend of mine; we’re cooking friends. And the Four Seasons—you can imagine what the economy was like in those days. Laura Maioglio from Barbetta brought not only a string quartet in eighteenth century costume, but fonduta and white truffles for four hundred people. Q: My goodness. Batterberry: Yes. Not today would this happen. And, oh, the smell of white truffles by the escalator was really something. Q: So the party was for about four hundred people? Batterberry: Yes, and a terrific New York mix, and we got a lot of press because of this restaurant element. It was crazy. The Persian Room. Luchow’s came and they brought their oompah band, and had sausages and sauerkraut. Q: Who asked these different restaurants to come? Batterberry: Bloomingdale’s did. I don’t know if they sent a sheet out on the book. I’m sure they did, and, of course, we knew some of them because they were in the book. We’d interviewed Andy Anspach of the Algonquin and so forth, and certainly the Four Seasons. We knew them. But people were turned on by the idea of doing something like that at Bloomingdale’s. So we were extremely fortunate. And on the strength of that, the party was such a success that Bloomingdale’s asked us to write the Bloomingdale’s Book of Entertaining for our sins—not a totally happy experience—that we did with Random House, and we packaged the book. Q: It was like a coffee table book? Batterberry: No. It was a useful book. They had recipes in it as well, and the photographs—Peggy Healy was the name of this very bright young woman, and now is a very bright somewhat older woman, who’s come back into our lives recently after many, many years. She said, “You pick the people, people who have some character.” And so Jim Beard was one of them, and Geoffrey Holder, our pals, Gael Greene, and then other friends of ours, more sort of social friends—lower case S—and so we did it. Q: This was for the party for the Bloomingdale’s book? Batterberry: They gave another party at Bloomingdale’s for the launch of it when it finally came out, and Jim Beard was there, and they set up each of the hosts in the book, there was a chapter, very short chapter on each one of them. They were asked to design a big tabletop in their taste using themes from the store and themes of their own. Q: And had you established Batterberry Associates at that point? Batterberry: No. That’s ’73. Then we continued writing. To go back, the thing about On the Town in New York was when it came out, overnight it put us in the food mafia, which was very small at that time. Q: So who would it have been, more or less? Batterberry: Well, there were two, but Jim Beard, he was our big daddy. His circle was Helen McCully, Sam Aaron. Let me see who else specifically. And then Craig Claiborne gave us a review saying it was the best book ever written on the subject. But we didn’t become friends with Craig for many years, because we felt out of loyalty to Jim, because there was a kind of unspoken antagonism between the two, and people said, “Well, you’re in one camp or the other.” Q: Do you have any idea what that was about? Batterberry: It was competitiveness, I think. Territorial and “I was here first.” Q: So after the book, then, what was your next project? Then you did the Bloomingdale's book, and then what? Batterberry: The Bloomingdale's book came out in ’76, and then also in ’76 we did a book with the Whitney Museum for the Bicentennial, on the history of American art for young people, and that was Pantheon, again, Ariane’s original publisher. Then our friend Massimo Vignelli called us and said, “Do you want to do a book on the history of fashion with me? I’ll design it. There’s a book packager called Chanticleer, Paul Steiner, and he liked your New York book.” Oh, I forgot to mention, yes, we were the arts editors of Harper’s Bazaar, contributing, and when the New York book came out, it really changed our lives a lot. That’s really what put us in the food trajectory in terms of publishing, because over at Hearst, at Harper’s Bazaar, they said, “Oh, we didn’t know you did food. We just thought you did art.” So they asked to do some food pieces for them, you know, about restaurants, who went where, and, you know— Q: For some of their magazines? Batterberry: For Harper’s Bazaar. Q: For Harper’s Bazaar itself. Batterberry: Yes. We later wrote for Connoisseur and Travel and Leisure and a number of magazines, New York Magazine. Q: And then when was the Good Living series that you did the pilot for? Batterberry: That was not until after American Express went through the first phase of buying Food and Wine. So that would have been in the early eighties. Q: Later, then. Batterberry: Yes. Q: What about the teletext project for Time Inc? Batterberry: That was also the early eighties. Q: That was in the early eighties. So, I guess now then we need to get to Food and Wine. How did that— Batterberry: We met a couple named Robert and Caroline Kenyon, who were the reps for The Economist. They were publisher’s reps. They were very, very skilled, very high-styled ad representatives. He was English. She was American. Their son is Sandy Kenyon, who’s on television now. Charming young man. And we were told by a mutual friend that they thought it was time for a modern food magazine, and we had been expressing the same idea. Q: This was when? Batterberry: Early seventies. Because it took us together six years at least, almost seven years, to raise the money for Food and Wine. So we came together, and having discussed, I expressed what I thought a food magazine should be. I say I because I’m more the food person than Ariane. Ariane had more the cultural view of it. Together they said, “Oh, that sounds right on.” Q: Now, what was that idea? Batterberry: The idea, number one, was there was evidence that a lot of gender taboos were being shattered in terms of a woman is in the kitchen, a man is at the grill outdoors, etc., etc., and at that point a lot of numbers of young men were going off to college with woks. You know, stir-fry was coming in at that point and so forth, just as girls were slamming the door like Nora in Doll’s House on the kitchen, because of the stigma of its being almost like a slavery. In any case, we thought there should be a magazine. We did not use the word, ever, unisex, but it should appeal equally to women and men, that it should appeal to younger people as well as older people, that you didn’t have to wait to become interested and express your interest in food. Q: And young meant— Batterberry: In their twenties. This was all theoretic, that every good writer, no matter what, has a good food story in him or her, and that we would get writers of a certain stature involved, and a quirky art approach, something distinctive and modern without being trendoid. So we had this idea, and a number of people got it, but never enough to put up the money. We took it around, and we really had a dog-and-pony show for various potential investors, including the Swiss, who finally said, “Oh, but Americans, in the long run, they only like hamburgers.” We heard that more than once. So that took a long while, but at a certain point we said, “All right. Now, we have to have some evidence before go to more potential investors, that there is an audience.” So we raised another $100,000 to do a test mailing. We rented lists that we felt were appropriate, and we went to Bill Jamey, who was a man who created mailing pieces, promotional mailing pieces for Time, Inc. and Time Life and so forth, and he was the sort of the one of choice. There was another man, whose name I can find out—I’ve forgotten it now—who had what was the forerunner of a computerized printout of the potential of the magazine. You fed the numbers into it. He was much sought after because he owned it outright. Anyway, the rule of thumb then in publishing, magazine publishing, was that if you had a 2 to a 2 and a half percent return, you really had something solid. Q: From the initial mailing? Batterberry: Yes. You could move ahead with that. So we got together with Bill Jamey and we said just the sort of things I’ve been saying, and the kind of stories that we envisioned. You know, there would be a gardening column as well as a vegetable garden with Thalassa Crusoe, who had a TV program at that point. Jim Beard, of course, was in the mix. He said, “Fine. Use my name,” etc. He was all behind us. Q: What kind of stories did you envision that were food-related? Batterberry: Well, along with Jim Beard was tapas, if you can imagine. There was one on soufflés, and we had pictures of Jacques Pépin. That was in the dummy. We used our art background, too, to get plates from the folk art museum and so forth. We wanted to do history, design, gifts, techniques. What we had done for the Bloomingdale's Book of Entertaining was we had broken things down into a scale of three, being the simplest and cheapest, the mid range, and go for broke. You know, those complex recipes— Q: Your vision of this magazine? Batterberry: We did this for the Bloomingdale's Book of Entertaining so this is the most essential equipment that you had to have and tabletop. And then mid range, and then the fantasy stuff. So we took that same approach to techniques. So if it was pâtés and tureens, you had the simplest pâté possible, and then through the most complex hobbyist tureen for the weekend, you know, you could spend a day and a half making it. And we applied that to other areas, such as tabletop and gifts. Of course we had drinks. You had to have drinks because of the liquor advertisers. Anyway, we tested it, and we got over 5 percent back. People were just dumbfounded. They still didn’t give us the money. “Well, yes,” they said, “I can see how this—yes,” blah, blah. It was draining at that point. Then we met someone who was connected to Working Woman magazine, which was a new magazine then. He had other connections, and one of them was with Playboy and Hefner, and Hugh Hefner had initiated a new program at Playboy, a new magazine division in which he would put up match dollars for new publications that he thought could make it, and that there would be a buy-out clause at a certain point down the line, six or seven years, whatever, then it would become the Playboy property. So we said, “Why not?” Well, he got the idea that young men would be interested in this. He’s very smart and very nice, a very nice guy. So we flew out to California and spent a day at the mansion with—oh, no, more than a day. We were in the Playboy guest house, and Christie, his daughter, had just graduated from college, so bright, and so—I hate to say it, meant for better things, but she was teaching Shakespeare to kids in ghettos and so forth. She was really a remarkable young woman. Anyway, we got together, and he said yes. And the thing about Hugh Hefner is, my take is he’s truly only interested in editorial. He’s a real editor. And so he enjoyed very much being taken through the dummy and discussing that, and so part of the deal, as we had never run a magazine, he gave us a sort of guru, a resident guru by the name of Mort Persky, who was a seasoned newspaper and magazine veteran, delightful guy. Delightful. From South Carolina. I remember one of the great lessons he taught me, and I spent weeks with him, day after day, but he said— Q: Where? Batterberry: In New York. First we met in California, but then in New York in the Playboy offices, just going over, talking out, talking out, talking out, and they said, “Well, you can’t have two editors-in-chief. Nobody ever does that.” So I was made the editor-in-chief and Ariane was executive editor. So we spent a lot of time with Mort, and we were talking about typography and typography design. He said in this warm southern accent, he said, “Just remember,” he said, “I remember there was an article about fire, and the designer spelled out the word ‘fire in logs.’” He said, “Don’t ever spell ‘fire in logs.’” [laughter] It spoke volumes, I must say, but he was full of—it was like having a tutor, a resident tutor. He kind of shepherded us through the Playboy politics, which was an enormous help, and we actually planned the first issues in the Playboy offices, because we didn’t have our permanent offices at that point, and it was such a wonderful period. Then when it was signed, we could go out and say to people, “Okay, now we’re doing it right,” or do whatever. In the first issue, Wilfred Sheed did a story, and then we got George. I went over to George’s, to Plimpton’s, and George agreed to do a series called Memorable Meals, which would be historically oriented stories. His assistant did most of the research and then he would do the writing. For example, the first one was the meal that was found on the ghost ship Marie Celeste, and then he did an absolutely marvelous one about if the pilgrims invited the Indians for Thanksgiving to New York City in 1978, how much would it cost? So they found out how much it would cost to dig a barbecue pit in Central Park and do the clambake, and then there were 126 tickets to Ain’t Misbehavin’ and whatever. [laughter] It was great. Q: When did the magazine actually start? Batterberry: The first issue was April 1978, but there were other stories, in that part of the deal was that there would be an insert in Playboy—this was Playboy’s deal—to “introduce the magazine,” in quotes, and Jim was in that, Jim Beard. Q: How so? Batterberry: Well, there was a story about him. We had photographed him. Dan went and photographed him, and it was about tapas. In that same issue there was a major feature on sex toys. It was not appropriate to have Food and Wine introduced with these sex gadgets. And I must say, my mother was rather surprised. [laughter] She was not passing them out heatedly to friends. Q: It would be noticeable. Batterberry: Yes, but what was really noticeable to us was they said, “Oh, of course you’ll have this insert.” They charged us. They deducted from their investment full-page rate, ad page rate, for the twenty-odd pages of this insert, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Anyway, so there went our bottom line. Q: Spending money. Batterberry: Spending money. Anyway, but we had a launch. The Kenyons organized a launch for potential advertisers at the Four Seasons restaurant, and the bell sounded for the party to begin, and there were no magazines. There were dummies of Food and Wine that would be passed out. Well, it turned out there had been a heist, because there are magazine thieves and they thought they were raiding a Playboy truck and they were getting Playboys, when, in fact, they were getting dummies of Food and Wine, and at the last minute they were found abandoned in some warehouse, I think, a garage in Brooklyn, so some of them were brought back to us in the nick of time. But there was one episode after the other. [laughs] The investor episode is to tell you. Schroeder Bank, a private bank, took us on, and said, “Oh, yes, we’ll find clients.” And they called, and they said, “There’s a Mr. Ianello,” I think his name was, “who’s interested in restaurants and might be interested in investing.” And the Kenyons were in bed over the weekend, and she was reading the paper, and she turned to Robert and she said, “Robert, the name Ianello, is that familiar to you?” It was Matty “The Horse” Iannello, who was the one who owned Umberto’s Clamhouse, and when there was this gang rub-out, he was found pleading for his life underneath the clam counter. Q: Oh, my. Batterberry: So this was another scrape, anyhow, close call. Not that we would have ever gone the way—but it was proposed to us that could be indeed a viable investor in a modern food magazine. Q: How different was your idea from whatever Gourmet was at that time? I can’t remember. Batterberry: It was quite different in that there was something pleasantly staid about Gourmet at that point. It was a very good travel magazine, but the tablecloths tended to be lacey and the recipes were set out in a way that they weren’t for people who really cooked. It was maybe something you handed your cook or so forth. It had a kind of archness, not always, though, because Jim Beard wrote for Gourmet, Hugh Johnson did, Gerri Trotta was an excellent writer, but the sum of its parts was suddenly, we thought, a bit old-fashioned. When Food and Wine first came out, within one year we overtook Gourmet in subscription, two- and three-year subscription renewals. We didn’t overtake them in subscription numbers, but in terms of the response. And what we found out, which was the final evidence that we had the right idea in the first place about who would be reading this, the average age of the Food and Wine reader was only a few years lower than the average age of the Gourmet. I think Gourmet was something like forty-three, forty-four, and ours was forty, whatever. But the average age of the male reader of Food and Wine was somewhere in the twenties, which meant that very young people were reading it as well, to bring the average down that low. It essentially was 50-50. It was actually 51 percent women, 49 percent male. Q: That must have been astonishing. Batterberry: It was. People had difficulty believing it, and they had such difficulty believing it, that’s why we had such difficulty with advertising for the first couple of years, and why we needed to refinance. And then another aspect of the magazine was it was the first magazine that raised money—we raised money as a legal tax shelter for the investors for the match dollars for Hefner. So there were lots of doctors and dentists and so forth in these groups that were represented by lawyers, and that, of course, in a number of years became no longer a viable way of doing it nor a legal way. It wasn’t that we became illegal, but there was this period of grace when you could do that. Q: With regard to recipes, how would you describe the degree of sophistication? Batterberry: Well, you had your choice. The really sophisticated, complex ones were presented, as I said, in the more complex of the three divisions of complexity, from the most simple to the most complex, but we had good international coverage. We had diet versions in the back of the book. Sylvia Sher did a diet version of low calorie—I can’t remember all of them now. I think low carbohydrate. So that at least there was one or two recipes you could find in the book if you were on a diet, you would find a version for yourself. Richard Sax was very young and very good, and we hired him as the head of our test kitchen, and then later he was joined by Chris Styler, Christopher Styler, who is now editor-at-large for Food Arts, and Jim Fobel, who was wonderful at food presentation, but the person who was key was our dear old friend Peter Prestcott, who is a man of many talents and he cooks beautifully, he can make paper sculptures, he could do anything. He’s a great stylist and he’s very worldly. He’s lived in many places, and he really helped us in the initial phase. Peter and I would go out propping together, or one night he spent the night on the kitchen floor to be sure that something was going to be ready for the shoot the next day. I mean, he was just wonderful. So we kept Peter as an editor, and he did all sorts of things, and American Express just did not know how to use him properly. Q: When did American Express get involved? Batterberry: In the early eighties. We only had the magazine for a few years. Q: So when American Express took it over, you were not there? Batterberry: Oh no. Well, they took it over from us. I mean, we arranged the sale, because Hefner wanted to take his money out and put it into the casino in Atlantic City, where, of course, he never got his liquor license and that was lost. Our other investors wanted to get their money out and put it into oil, just before the oil crashed in Houston the following year. So that was a tense period. Q: And that was when? Batterberry: Eighty-two, I think. No, no. Eighty-one. Q: That must have been very disappointing. Batterberry: Well, it certainly was, but at the same time our feeling was, we comforted ourselves by saying that it was like having a very popular young daughter who marries a billionaire, and you just hope that he was going to take care of her properly. It was out of the question that we would stay on, because—I’m not going to name names—it was brutally clear that they were going to dumb it down. I must say, in Dana Cowen, they finally got a very good editor later on. Q: I guess what I’m confused about is the people took their money out, then how did you keep going? Batterberry: We had to find a new investor, and there were several people interested, but they were dallying, as they always do when they know that you need something done quickly, and also that was getting into another recessionary period. So when it appeared in Phil Dougherty’s advertising column in the Times, Ariane had spoken with him. On the strength of that, American Express contacted us. They had had such a success with Travel and Leisure at that point, that they were looking for a food magazine, particularly one that would appeal to and recruit more restaurant clients. [End of interview] Batterberry - 1 - PAGE 1