TTT

Interviewee:  Barbara Kafka							      Session #1

Interviewer:  Judith Weinraub					           New York City

Date:  April 3, 2009

Q:  It’s April 3, 2009.  This is Judith Weinraub, and I’m sitting with Barbara Kafka in her home on New York’s Upper East Side.
Good morning, Barbara.

Kafka:  Good morning.

Q:  The Upper East Side seems to have been the place where you’ve really spent so much of your life.

Kafka:  Yes, indeed.  My parents—well, yes.

Q:  I have been able to read the least about it, except that you went out to restaurants with your parents, and they were fine restaurants.  Could you tell me—

Kafka:  But they were not on the Upper East Side.

Q:  I tell you what.  Let’s go back a bit and see.  Could you tell me where and when you were born and tell me something about your childhood and your early years?

Kafka:  August 6, 1933, I was born.  My parents, I like to say, were both self-made men.

Q:  How so?

Kafka:  My father was an immigrant from the Pale of Settlement in Minsk near Pinsk and [unclear], and my mother was born in this country to a family of ardent socialists.  Her father, a very good-looking, rather small man, built houses—bungalows they were in those days—in Rockaway, and very much like the Woody Allen movie.  It was only on Saturdays that he took children to the theater.  It was only on Yom Kippur that he went shopping for groceries and carried them home.
A famous family story, he was up in the upstairs room, there was a fire in the house, he was throwing books out the window, and yelling, “Dora!  Get the children!” Dora being his wife.  It was a tradition in which men were learned, basically, although he did do physical labor, and women worked.

Q:  Women worked at home?

Kafka:  No.  No, no, no.  Women worked.

Q:  Doing what kinds of things?

Kafka:  Well, my grandmother had a shop, that grandmother.  And my other grandmother, my father’s mother, was quite an extraordinary woman.  Unfortunately, by the time I knew her, she was quite old.  She had had a busy life, and they had not come to this country till after husband died.  She had met her husband, I guess she was about sixteen or seventeen.  He was married, she fell in love, and then her sister died, leaving two small children, and she was, as they were in those days, married off to the widower to bring up the children.
Shortly thereafter, the invalid wife of her love died, and she went around the Pale of Settlement on foot and gathered together a minion of elders and got permission to leave the man to whom she was married if she would take the children and rear them.  Her then to-be husband had already two children.  So she started married life at eighteen or nineteen with four children.  She then proceeded to have nine of her own, of which two died; they were premature twins.  She had a bakery, a restaurant, it was sort of an inn, and an apple orchard, and she raised the children.

Q:  What energy.

Kafka:  Her husband was a Yeshiva Bocher.  He was a scholar and he did not work.  They were already unusual in that they sent the children to gymnasium during the day and Cheder, Jewish school, at night.

Q:  Boys and girls?

Kafka:  Boys and girls.  And, unfortunately for my grandmother, her eldest daughter, who was her helpmate, fell in love with one of the teachers at the gymnasium, a Russian, and married him and moved to Moscow, and my grandmother couldn’t go visit them because Jews were not allowed in Moscow at that time.

Q:  Heartbreaking.

Kafka:  And when her husband died, she sent the two oldest boys, not her children, but one from each of the adopted families, to America to see if it was all right, and they wrote back that it was fine.  And she sold everything and took all these children on a boat to America.  Got to America, Ellis Island, the two boys met them, and my father supported them financially till the end of their lives, because they arrived at the boat with American clothes, plus fours and what have you, and took their Russian velvet clothes with the caracal collars and threw them into the water.

Q:  Oh, my goodness.  What a dramatic gesture and great story.

Kafka:  Well, they were not to be greenhorns and they were not to be laughed at.  They took all of them to an apartment they had rented on the Lower East Side, and my grandmother took one look at the place and she said, “We will stay here tonight.  Tomorrow we move.  I did not come all the way to America to live in a ghetto.”  And she moved them to upper Broadway.

Q:  Upper Broadway then was where?

Kafka:  In the nineties.  It was Irish, and my father recalls being beaten up every day on the way to school.  He delivered newspapers, and sometimes up flights of stairs, and didn’t get paid.  He had public education.  Every one of her children, including grown men, completed American school.  If she had to send them back to sit in kindergarten, they did, and all of them went to college and half of them had graduate degrees.  I mean, she meant what she said.  So she was a quite an outstanding presence.
My father went to CCNY, and then he took a one-year business degree at NYU, which he paid for.  Then he went to work at Gimbel’s and became quite shortly the china and the glass buyer, which I think had a big influence on my life.

Q:  How so?

Kafka:  He loved glassware, he really did, and later in his life in his business life, he commissioned a lot of it, and I have a plethora of glasses for wine and so forth, and I think that was an influence in my life, and table settings and what have you.
In any case, not too long thereafter—I mean, when I say self-made, he bought into a business, a cosmetic and perfume business, and had a low-end cosmetic business, which then financed the other thing.

Q:  Financed the—

Kafka:  The high-end.  The only thing I really remember about it—it was called Xanadou, and it was sold in the five-and-ten and so forth—was we had a big woven bamboo trunk that things had come in, and there were many, many Chinese coins in it, because the stuff came from China and the coins were used as packing material.

Q:  Oh, my.

Kafka:  They were worthless.  In any case, the upper-end business was a perfume business, and he became a partner with a French owner, Jacques Guerin, who had an enormous influence on my mind.

Q:  In terms of how you saw what?

Kafka:  Oh, dear.  Jacques was a great collector and extremely knowledgeable, very good-looking, gay, as we said in those days.  And, unlike myself, an amasser, he was a collector.  He ran this perfume business and he, however, would go during the long French lunch hour every day to the museums and the booksellers and what have you.  After the Second World War, he offered to give the Louvre his collection of Soutines.  He had one third of all the Soutines in the world.  He helped support Soutine.  Madame Gastain [phonetic] who had been Soutine’s mistress, had another third.  He said he would give it to them if they gave a room in perpetuity to the collection.  They refused, and so he didn’t give it.  And then, of course, for years thereafter, the curator sat on his doorstep trying to get it.
When Proust died, he went to Proust’s home—he knew the family—and offered to buy whatever they would sell.  There had been a great scandal about some author’s letters somewhat prior to this, and so he promised to never publish them, and he didn’t.

Q:  That’s amazing.

Kafka:  His bedroom was Proust’s study, with the cork-lined walls.  He bought all of it.  He had all the original manuscripts, and so that was one collection.
Then he had enough Blue Period Picassos that the dining room in the country was called the Blue Room.  A man died in the suburbs of Paris. Before the Second World War, the French had the right to quarry marble in the famous Roman—it was auctioned off.  And when the man died, he went out to his house and saw the most hideous house you have ever seen, it was stucco, and into it were plunged pieces of marble that the man had brought back from the quarry, sort of randomly.  Jacques said that he would build the family a new house instead of this monstrosity, and all he wanted was the marble, for which he got the back of a torso of a Greek fifth-century boy, two heroic-size Roman  marble figures of women of some sort or another, and various other Roman portrait heads and what have you.  So that’s what I mean when I say he was a great collector.
When he learned that I was interested in cookbooks, he bought me a Pauline de Rothschild’s copy of Bab because I said I admired Ali Bab.  It was the second edition, which was the first complete edition, and a collector’s item.

Q:  This would have been when you were approximately how old?

Kafka:  I was already doing cooking, so I must have been twenty-five, twenty-six, something like that.

Q:  How old were you when you got to know him?

Kafka:  I was about seven.  There’s a famous novel written about him called The Bâtard.  He was a bastard, literally, I could go on about him forever, but I don’t think you want me to.

Q:  No, that’s all right.  In terms of the influence on you, how did it affect the way you saw things or proceeded in life?

Kafka:  The level of culture and of involvement in the arts that I didn’t know.  My parents, my mother, the other self-made man to whom we have not yet gotten, they were interested in politics and proceeding in life.  They had many interesting friends, but they were not at that time primarily interested in the arts.  They were not opera-goers or symphony-goers.  After my father became involved with Jacques and after the Second World War, they began buying art and they had a very nice collection.

Q:  When you say “they,” at this point you mean—

Kafka:  My parents.  And so I was exposed to a world.  There was another Frenchman, and I speak French really quite perfectly because to me it was culture, you see, and also during the Second World War there were a lot of French children who were here, whose fathers were either with the Resistance or were Jewish who were sent out of the country.  The other was a man named Edouard “Ducky” Cournand, Ducky because he was with the Lafayette Escadrille during the First World War, and they all had nicknames.  His brother won a Nobel Prize, a very nasty man.  He, however, inserted through his own arm a catheter into his heart.

Q:  For a purpose.

Kafka:  Yes.  He was a doctor.

Q:  Do you have siblings?

Kafka:  No, I have no siblings.  I was the only child.  My mother, I don’t think, really wanted children.  She did what she had to do.  Certainly sex was not her favorite game, although she was very flirtatious and seductive with men.
In any case, she was the middle of three children.  Her older brother became a judge, rather, the highest court in New York State.  I mean, they were also encouraged to achieve.  I mean, that’s what they had in common, let’s say, with my father’s parents, my father’s mother.  She also put herself through school.  She went to Hunter, and in those days, you could go to law school at night while you were still in college, and she went to NYU law school, and she was the first woman graduate of NYU law school.
After she graduated, she got a Susan B. Anthony Fellowship, like that, to Bryn Mawr and took her degree in social engineering, which in those days was where—I forget, Gilbreth’s Cheaper by the Dozen, not—

Q:  I’m sorry.  This was after her law school graduation?

Kafka:  Yes, after college and law school, which coincided.  She taught French when she was in college to pay her way, English as a second language.

Q:  So this set fairly high standards for you, all of this.

Kafka: Oh, yes. And she came back to New York—she was the original asker after I got a 95 on an exam: Where are the other five points?
She came back to New York and took a degree in social work, and because she could not as a woman get a job with a law firm, they offered her secretarial jobs and so forth.  My mother never learned to cook, she didn’t keep house, and she didn’t learn to type.  She would not do any of the expected woman’s jobs.  Finally, after another job that she had, a management consultancy job, she met my father and, being seductive, she took him away from her employer’s daughter, whom he was seeing.  She got a job with the U.S. government, which would employ women.

Q:  In New York?

Kafka:  In New York.  She became regional attorney for the Social Security Administration, which was new, and helped write the original Social Security legislation, was down in Washington a lot for that.  Ann Rosenberg, who was an extraordinary woman as well, was always the regional director, and she was the regional attorney.  Before that, she had argued a case before the Supreme Court, the NRA case, which they lost.
Then with the Second World War, Social Security was expanded to be the War Manpower Commission, and she was regional attorney for the War Manpower Commission, which was Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, so a large part of the economy.  So when I say “two self-made men,” I’m being quite literal.

Q:  When did you come along in their marriage?

Kafka:  She was, I think, twenty-seven.

Q:  And doing what when you were born?

Kafka:  Working.

Q:  At which of these—

Kafka:  I don’t know.  I was not exactly conscious at the time.  [laughs]  But they had been living in the Village.  My mother, to show you how upwardly mobile she was, she would not buy furniture because they didn’t have enough money.  She rented furniture because she knew that some day she was going to get real furniture, and she waited.  They took an apartment then on West End Avenue, which was the first place I lived, and the only things I remember about it were it had a large terrace which had like a cage over it and a sunken living room, very chic in those days.

Q:  Very glam, yes.

Kafka:  But she was still on the move, and they moved to East 85th Street when I was about three, I guess.
Then a very important person, influence, entered my life, a woman named Rachel Welman.  An unusual background, a black Canadian woman raised by the Salvation Army, and she cooked brilliantly.  In those days, it didn’t require much money to have household help.  We were in the Depression.  When my parents got married, it was 1929, and they were on the boat coming back when the crash happened.
Rachel was a brilliant cook.  One meets geniuses in cooking capacities, and she was.  My mother could describe anything to her, and she could make it.  She was shocked, however, once, the first year she was there, when she offered to make the Passover dinner.  She’d worked for a Jewish family before, and my mother explained that, of course, they didn’t observe.  But I remember her coming for the interview, so I was about three years old.

Q:  For a black Canadian who grew up in the Salvation Army, where did she learn how to cook?

Kafka:  One has no idea how she turned out to be such a brilliant cook.  I mean, I’m sure in the Salvation Army they taught them the rudiments of cooking as appropriate to girls in those days, sewing, cooking.  My mother couldn’t sew either.  She could do a hem, very badly.  But Rachel just had the gift.  And she was very devout.  She was an aficionado—I use the word advisedly—of Father Divine.  She used to go there during her summer vacation, or whenever her vacation was.  And she had a son.  The son was married.  They had a daughter, Florence.

Q:  And was she living with you?

Kafka:  She lived with us.  Oh yes.  And considering what a liberal my mother was, the maids’ rooms were appalling.  But I grew up really without any stigma about black people.  I did not cook with Rachel.  Everybody always asks me.  The only thing she let me do was occasionally beat batter for cake, always in one direction.  You never changed direction.  But other than that, I never cooked with her.  She didn’t want anybody mussing in her kitchen.

Q:  Did you want to?

Kafka:  I don’t know.  I loved to eat.
Then my mother, when we got to just before the beginnings of the war when the news coming out of Germany was very bad, out of Europe, typical of my mother being a social contrarian, found me a German nanny, who then went back to join the Third Reich, and I had German frauleins all during my growing-up because my mother was never home or not home much.
I became very close to my father.  I like men a lot.  And although he had a fierce temper, I learned to stand up, and I think it’s how I later knew how to deal in French kitchens, where I would be the first woman they’d ever seen in the kitchen and telling them what to do, moreover.

Q:  I would have liked to have seen that.

Kafka:  Well, I’m small.  I always looked young.  And I learned to say, when they offered to carry a pot for me, “Ma chère, let me carry that for you.”
“Get the fuck out of my way.  I can carry it myself.”

Q:  We’ll get back to what you were talking about, but when would that have been when you were working in French kitchens?

Kafka:  Working for Joe Baum at Windows.

Q:  Where did you go to school?

Kafka:  I went to the best school I have ever been at, which was the Lincoln School.  Not the new Lincoln School, which came after, but the old Lincoln School was a Rockefeller Grant school administered by Teachers College.  That was for gifted children.

Q:  So was that at Columbia?

Kafka:  No, it was in its own building in the middle of Harlem, right on Morningside Park when I first went.  I had no fear of that, even though routinely Morningside Park would be roped off because someone had been killed in it.  But it was an experimental school long before that became popular.

Q:  Experimental, how so?

Kafka:  We were taught geometry at maybe six or seven, and the way we were taught was, for instance, they would put two dots on a board, and we were given, I guess, no ruler, but a protractor, and we were challenged to find the center point.

Q:  That’s challenging.

Kafka:  There was the librarian—it was a wonderful, very good library—named Miss Eaton, E-a-t-o-n, who was for many years the children’s book reviewer for the New York Times.  I think she was married, but I’m not sure.  She was Miss Eaton.  And I was a voracious reader.  That I remember clearly.  Four years old, I’m sitting on the can in the morning, because the German nanny said you had to go before you went out the house, and I had a book open in front of me.  I was looking at pictures, and suddenly I realized I could read.

Q:  Oh, my goodness.

Kafka:  And I never stopped.  I would take books out of the library, two, three at a time, and I would bring them back the next day, and Miss Eaton thought I was showing off.  So she sat down with me very nicely and started talking to me about the books, and she had realized that I’d read them, and then she began supplying me with literature, wonderful literature.

Q:  You were how old at that point, ballpark?

Kafka:  I must have been five.

Q:  Good heavens.

Kafka:  And she began supplying me with books.  When I was eleven, she gave me Jane Austen, and that was transformative.  So she was another enormous influence.  At Christmastime, she used to tell the story of the Christmas rose.

Q:  I don’t know that story.

Kafka:  It’s an Oscar Wilde story about the nightingale who pierces its breast, a sad, tragic, wonderful story about self-sacrifice for art.
I became a dancer at four.  My mother had very close friend, Sidney Cohn, C-o-h-n, without an e, who was a lawyer and, while not himself a communist, was married to a woman who was probably a communist, Vera Boudin Cohn.  And if the name Boudin rings a bell, that was her niece.

Q:  You mean Kathy Boudin?

Kafka:  Kathy Boudin.  It was Vera’s father’s firm.  So Sidney represented quite a few of the Hollywood Ten, including Carl Foreman.  He adored my mother.  Vera was crazy as a loon and finally committed suicide jumping off a boat.  He used to come over and play gin with my mother.  She was a lethal gin player.  He was important.  When I went off to college, Radcliffe, he took me to Brentano’s, which was then on Fifth Avenue on the West Side, and he bought me a library.

Q:  Oh, my goodness.

Kafka:  I could pick what I wanted, and I went off to Radcliffe with a library.  It was small, but the idea was so important.  The respect was so important.

Q:  Were they reference books or classics or what?

Kafka:  Reference books and poetry primarily.  Very interested in poetry.
So anyhow, he was the lawyer, when I was a child, for Massine.  I had been taken to the ballet, and I declared—I was very determined—that I was going to be a dancer, and my parents explained to me that at four years old you could not be a dancer.  Then they had Sidney talk to me, and he explained to me that four-year-old—and I stamped my little feet.  So finally they said that if I talked to Massine and he told me, would I accept it.  “Yes,” I said.  So I went to a rehearsal studio, and he had me do some things and he took me on.

Q:  Oh, how spectacular.

Kafka:  Until he went back to Europe.  Then I, years later, met his son, who knew about me.  But when I gave up ballet and went to college, he ceased talking to me.

Q:  Massine?

Kafka:  Yes.

Q:  You were short for a dancer, though?

Kafka:  Not in those days.

Q:  Really?

Kafka:  Oh no.

Q:  I didn’t realize that.

Kafka:  In those days, you were supposed to be small and light so men could lift you.  Think of Danilova.  Think of Markova.  They were all short.

Q:  I had no idea how tall they were.

Kafka:  They were all short, all about 5’2”, all about my height.  Those were the three baby ballerinas.  Baronova was somewhat taller, but maybe no more than 5’5”.  These great tall creatures they have today would not have made it, would not have been accepted.

Q:  Before we get you to Radcliffe, what was that business in your Lifetime Achievement citation [from the James Beard Foundation] about your eating out with your parents at fine restaurants?

Kafka:  Well, as I say, my mother didn’t cook.  Rachel cooked, but Rachel even then was given a day off, Thursdays and Sundays.  Thursdays, I was at home and given something or other, but Sundays we often went out because Mother didn’t cook.  And then when my mother was going to Washington a great deal, my father, I think as a form of unspoken retaliation, used to take me to restaurants with him, which is when I remember the Chambord.

Q:  Oh, that’s pretty good.

Kafka:  Oh, yes, yes.  That was then on Third Avenue.  We’re not ever going to see restaurants like that again.  They would make you any classic dish from the French repertoire—they were not into nouvelle cuisine, obviously—if they had the ingredients in the house.  They had a glass window onto the kitchen.

Q:  Oh, really advanced.

Kafka:  Yes, it was in the back, a glass widow, and you could see the copper pots hanging.  There were nothing but copper pots.  There was no aluminum in that kitchen, I assure you.
And I suppose the most notable experience from my point of view was sitting with my father on Third Avenue.  They had a few tables outside, and my father was presented with the wine list, and he ordered a 1919 wine.  1919 was the great vintage, say, until ’72, you know, acclaimed in that way—’45.  But, of course, that was during the war, but ’45 was after the war.  France was celebrating as if the hills were celebrating.  And the, I don’t know, wine steward, captain, whatever, came over for my father to taste the wine, and he pointed at me and he said, “She’ll taste it.”

Q:  That’s fabulous.

Kafka:  Well, what greater seduction.

Q:  And you were about how old?

Kafka:  Oh, I can’t have been more than ten or something.

Q:  Oh, my.

Kafka:  ‘43.  It was during the war.

Q:  So do you remember the kinds of things you would eat there?

Kafka:  Only the style, not the particular dishes.  They merge into other dishes.

Q:  And the style would have been—

Kafka:  Classic French cuisine.

Q:  And how different was that from what you were eating at home?

Kafka:  In part, different.  For instance, we went to Lafayette with my mother in the Village.  Not the Lafayette that you would remember, but there was one in Greenwich Village, which was wonderful.  It had a black and white tile floor next to the bar, which went lengthwise like a New York brownstone, except wider, and it had chess tables down the middle.  The same kind of people who later played chess in the park, in Washington Square Park, played chess at these tables. So you would walk down there, and then you’d walk into a big dining room with great starched white linen tablecloths and linen napkins.  And there I remember a dish, because it was my mother’s favorite, which was moules marinières.

Q:  And you were little?

Kafka:  Well, it was all during the Second World War.  I was only twelve when the war ended.

Q:  Yes, so you still were little.  Yes, that’s what I meant.

Kafka:  Yes.

Q:  Meanwhile, Rachel was cooking what kinds of things at home?

Kafka:  Well, Mother would come back and would say that she—for instance, she had a sole dish, s-o-l-e, with wine and etc., and shallots and what have you.  I mean, she could describe the thing well.  She was a good eater.  And Rachel would make it.  But she would also make meatloaf and soups and a few Jewish specialties, a good brisket.  She made everything.  And we always had salad, my father loved salad, and we had a lot when there was company, with which I was included at a quite young age.  It was the period of sliced money on a plate, in my opinion; i.e., beef.  At my house, it was rare, which was unusual.
They went to Europe on their honeymoon, and my mother, my father offered her the classic diamond ring, and she said, no, she didn’t want it; she wanted to go to Europe.  And she got a jade ring, which I still have, and they went to Europe.  So this was always an ambition.  She learned to speak French very badly, I mean not illiterately, but the accent was appalling.  She had no ear, total tin ear, couldn’t carry a tune.  But, as I say, she wanted to go to France.
They went to Russia and met my father’s sister.  By that time they could go to Moscow.  And my aunt who I never met, Sonia, who was really my father’s mother in many ways, took my mother aside, according to my mother.  Mother was a consummate liar, a compulsive liar.  Took her aside and said, “Don’t let him go back to Slutz.  The apples are never as red as you think they were.”

Q:  Oh, how wonderful.

Kafka:  It was a wonderful line.  My mother was a terrible liar, and my father and mother fought constantly.  Dinner table was a nightmare in that sense, so only the food was a saving grace.  My mother regularly left it in tears.
When I was older, I went out with my father one day.  I don’t know.  We went from the garage to pick up a car, and they had been to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf the night before.  And I said, malice aforethought, “Tell me, Daddy, what did you think of the play?”
	And he said, “Your mother and I never used foul language.”  And it was just like that in my house when I was growing up, up to the adoptive child.

Q:  Aha.

Kafka:  I was taken to my pediatrician’s office, which will get you back to how I reconstructed [that I had] celiac disease, and shown a beautiful blond baby and told that this was going to be my new brother.

Q:  A picture or the real baby?

Kafka:  A real baby.  Years later, I got up the nerve to ask my mother whatever happened, and she said, “Oh, you didn’t want him.”

Q:  Oh, my god.

Kafka:  Oh, she was not a nice—to me, not a good mother.

Q:  Wow.  And there never was another adoptive child?

Kafka:  No.  It was the mythical, I mean really Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  You remember the mythical adoptive child in that?

Q:  But you do remember being taken to the doctor’s office?

Kafka:  Yes.  He was Sidney Haas, he was my pediatrician for many years, and he invented the banana powdered diet for celiac babies.  And that is how I began to reconstruct, and the fact that there had been some deprivation as a child of food.

Q:  So you think you had celiac disease long ago?

Kafka:  Yes, exactly.

Q:  Consistently or—

Kafka:  You never get rid of it.  You go into a kind of remission, or many people do; some people never do.  Lactose intolerance is very much an Ashkenazi Jew phenomenon.  So the combination came back and hit me upside the head.

Q:  And must have affected what you could and couldn’t eat comfortably.

Kafka:  You’re goddamned right.

Q:  So when did your interest in food and in cooking develop?

Kafka:  Well, I was always interested in food.  My father, much to my mother’s upwardly mobile disgust, would pick up a sirloin steak bone and gnaw it.  He loved food.  He loved good wine.  My mother loved food, and Rachel was a great cook.  So I always loved good food.

Q:  Were you curious about cooking it yourself?

Kafka:  No.  I mean, I had no other place to hang out when the frauleins were off.  I mean, you think I’m kidding?

Q:  No, I don’t.  I don’t.

Kafka:  After the war in Germany was over, guess what my mother found me to take care of me?  A Japanese.

Q:  She was quirky.

Kafka:  No, she wasn’t quirky; she was principled.

Q:  I see.

Kafka:  And I paid for the principle.

Q:  I bet.

Kafka:  One E.  One A. 
In any case, when I went off to college—but I knew—to tell you again the disagreeable side of me, as I say, I’m opinionated.  That’s the name of one of my books, The Opinionated Palate.  I was going to name it The Omnivore, but my editor didn’t like that.  I thought I could do anything.  I wanted to dance, I danced.  I wanted to speak French, I spoke French.  I wanted to read, I read.  There were not great numbers of books in my house.  There were books.  My mother read mystery novels to go to sleep at night.  She had, for instance, a friend who was a professor, an assistant professor or something at Columbia, of modern literature, and he brought them a copy, which I still have, of the portable James Joyce.  Those were Viking, I think, editions.

Q:  I can actually picture it, yes.

Kafka:  He had brought it to them as a gift, because he had edited it.  By this time, I was at Dalton, because after I left Lincoln because they shut down the experiment and merged it with Horace Mann, and then the Lincoln parents started another private school, but it was really not the same.  Then my mother wanted me to go to Dalton, and I didn’t want to go to Dalton.  I thought it was sloppy.

Q:  Were you living on the East Side by that point?

Kafka:  Oh yes, we were living on 85th Street.  First, we lived on 85th Street between Park and Madison, just off Madison.  And then, still upwardly mobile, my mother finally moved us to 1016 Fifth Avenue, not on the park; we didn’t get that fancy.  But we had an apartment at 1016.  Then, finally, my father moved us, after the Second World War and after apartments became somewhat more available, to 1107 Fifth Avenue, which is right up here on 92nd Street.  So I went to Brearley and encountered discrimination for the first time in my life.

Q: Wait a second.  You went to Dalton for a while?

Kafka:  I went to Brearley.  No.  First, I went to Brearley.  I did go to Dalton finally.  I went to Brearley and encountered discrimination for the first time in my life.  Jews were not acceptable.  I was too smart-assed, whereas before, I had been praised for being smart and verbal.

Q:  Just plain smart, yes.

Kafka:  There were a couple Jews in my class, but they were definitely German Jews with a lot of money, the Strausses, who owned Macy’s, and Iris Love, whose mother was a Guggenheim, but whose father was Episcopalian.  But you have to remember that anti-Semitism was rife in those classes at that time, even later.  Anyhow, I stood it as long as I could.  Iris, you know, is gay.  Iris’ mother shipped her off to Madeira’s in Washington and told her she could come back after a year if she didn’t like it.  Of course, she never let her come back.

Q:  Because?

Kafka:  She didn’t like her.  She liked Noelle, Iris’ older sister, who did the appropriate thing, who got married, who was pretty.  Iris was a big solid girl, and Iris stood up for me at Brearley, which I badly needed.  It was physically abuse.  And when she left, I basically called it a day.
Now, Ducky Cournand’s daughter, Evie, was already at Brearley, which I think influenced me.  She was a year ahead of me at Brearley, and I wanted to skip and be in her class, and Brearley, of course, wouldn’t let me do that.  She was a very strange girl.  These are not, you know, odd remembrances.  Understandably, her mother died when she was quite young, and her parents were, I think, Hungarian immigrants.  Yes, Hungarian, Polacek.  And he had become very wealthy.  He did all the bronze work for Rockefeller Center, which is all bronze, all the fittings, and he gave the atlas to them as a gift of thank you when it opened.  We used to go out there on weekends—they lived on Long Island—and in the summer.  I mean, my mother had to do something with me, right?

Q:  Right.

Kafka:  So when the fraulein when on vacation, I was shipped out to Long Island with Evie, and she was very odd and I disliked her.  She was also one of the reasons I learned French, because her governess, who was very important to her because she had no mother, and her governess, Moochie, was Swiss French.  And one of Evie’s way of avoiding me, since her father was also French, was to speak French.
Lest you think that I’m making up that she was odd, she committed suicide in her—she also was a dancer, but a very bad dancer.  But she had a lot of money, and she started a ballet company in which she performed.  When her teacher, who had been her cousin’s teacher but had sort of taken her over, died, which I guess was her second mother in some way—not one I would have chosen but her second mother—she jumped out a window.  So I mean, when I say odd—but on the other hand, her grandmother—it was a batty family.  I mean, what’s his name, Cournand was a mean son of a bitch.  Not Ducky; his brother.

Q:  What kinds of meals did they have out there?  Do you remember?

Kafka:  The most revelatory food memory there was they had a cook.  The kitchen was in the basement.  It was a great big house on the sound side of Long Island, on the water.  I have two outstanding food memories.  One is the cook was Hungarian and used to stretch strudel dough on the kitchen table.  When I later tried to invent, because all of my cooking is self-invented basically from books and from doing, how to make strudel dough, nobody explained to me, really.  I mean, they said to me—but it kept breaking and tearing.  And I realized that her kitchen was always steamy, so I put water on to boil, and it became a piece of cake, almost literally.  She was very white, like the flour, and round and soft like the dough, and she made Hungarian food.  But I don’t think I was so involved about the process.  This miracle thing was wonderful.
Then there was a weeping mulberry tree in the yard, black mulberries.  Most of the mulberry trees in America are white mulberries, such as you find in Turkey and were grown because we tried to start a silk industry here, and the white mulberries were grown to feed the silkworms.  But this was a black mulberry, and it was a weeping mulberry.  I don’t know if you have ever seen weeping mulberries—

Q:  I don’t think so.

Kafka:  —but they go right down to the ground.  They look like great cascades.  I now have one, but it’s not black.  But, I mean, this tree stayed with me.  And we wore little white dresses, of course, and headbands.

Q:  Little white dresses for dinner or for—

Kafka:  Always.  There were no pants then for little girls, certainly not in Mrs. Polacek’s house.  When we went underneath the mulberry tree, and we would eat the wonderfully fresh mulberries from the inside.  Nothing is a good as a mulberry when it’s ripe, but, of course, you never see them in the store because you can’t ship them.  They crush almost instantly.  And, of course, we came back covered with stains.  That was the other great food memory of that time.
Evie used to be taken, and I would go with her, every weekend to the mausoleum of her mother, and she had to write a letter to her mother, and her grandmother made her stand there in the mausoleum and read it.  So she had every excuse for being peculiar, if you want.  Ducky tried with me, I mean he really tried, because it was a poisonous environment.   And, of course, my mother didn’t really buy me clothes.

Q:  You’d be sent out there for a weekend, for a week, for what?

Kafka:  A couple weeks.

Q:  A couple weeks at a time.

Kafka:  The vacation period of the fraulein.
So, anyhow, I finally left Brearley, which was just intolerable, and I went to Dalton, which was a failure, from my point of view, because I had succumbed to my mother.  But I did skip a grade, and I got out of there in two years, maybe three; I forget.  Anyhow, I had a wonderful teacher, who was impossible to most students, called Miss Downes.  She was roomed with Miss Seeger, who was Pete Seeger’s sister.

Q:  Roomed with as in their offices or in their homes?

Kafka:  In their home, with Miss Seeger.  She did, however, after Miss Seeger died, go back to England and get married to a man who’d been her beau when she was young.  So whatever her life was, I don’t know, I cannot—but Miss Seeger obviously had a very literary association.  Her brother was a well-known war poet from the First World War.
Miss Downes was the first good teacher, great teacher, I had after leaving Lincoln, and she was my homeroom teacher and she was my English teacher, she was an English teacher, and I don’t think she liked me very much at the beginning.  As I say, I was a smart-ass.  Then she told us to go home and read a book and come back and write a report on it.  Before that, she’d had us writing précis.  That was a very common way of teaching in those days.
So I found this book that this professor had given my mother and it had The Exiles in it, and I read The Exiles, which was his only play, and I read Dubliners.  And I went back and I wrote my report for Miss Downes, and she was ravished that I could read these things, (a), that I could understand them, and she asked me—I guess it was Portrait that she asked me finally, because the next night I read Portrait, and she asked me, “What is the most important thing in Portrait?”
	And I said, “It’s when he crosses the bridge and he goes from being a child to being a writer and a man.”
	And it was she, I’m sure, who got me.  I mean, I was very bright, I had very good grades, I had great test scores, but I was shown by the advisor at Radcliffe the letter she’d written for me, and she said, “Anybody who teaches this young woman is blessed.”

Q:  Oh, that’s terrific.

Kafka:  And she blessed me.  She was rigorous.  She was not warm.  I don’t think I would have known how to deal with warmth.  But she was a tremendous asset and role model for literature.  So, literature and dance and eating and my father were the poles of my youth.
I didn’t get involved in cooking at all until I was at Radcliffe, and I guess in my second year, a very clever group—I always dated guys who were older than I was until I married my husband, who’s nine months older than I, and this very clever group of young men at the law school decided that they would have a cooking contest and their girlfriends could cook a meal and then they would award a prize.

Q:  You mean, you were going out with one of these guys?

Kafka:  Yes. Well, not seriously, I know.  So, of course, competition was never to be avoided, right?  So I cooked a dinner and I won the prize.

Q:  And what did you cook?

Kafka:  I have no idea.  I have no idea.

Q:  Do you remember being anxious about it, not at all anxious about it?

Kafka:  No, I wasn’t anxious.  I’d seen cooking done.  I’d seen people put their hands in food.  It never occurred to me that it was something I couldn’t do.

Q:  Do you think it was a complete meal or a dish?

Kafka:  It was a complete meal.  Even a dessert, which I almost never make.  I mean, I make, but I don’t bake.  Rachel was a great baker.  I don’t bake.  But my mother was incredibly competitive, and, obviously, I chose fields in which she had no presence.

Q:  Wisely.

Kafka:  Chicken.
 
Kafka:  I think I said in Soup that in the interstices of her accomplishments, I found a way of life and I found that people—then I got married.  I went to work for Farrar Strauss after I graduated.

Q:  Wait a second.  When did you get married?

Kafka:  1959, I guess.  1954.  No, not 1954.  1955.

Q:  And you had been out of school—

Kafka:  A year.  I knew him at college and he was—

 [Interruption]

Kafka:  After Farrar Strauss, I went to St. Louis because my husband was in medical school.

Q:  Now, wait.  When were you at Farrar Strauss?

Kafka:  From my graduation in 1954 till I married.

Q:  Doing what?

Kafka:  Working in the publicity department.  You don’t think we were allowed to be editors in those days.

Q:  Definitely not, no.

Kafka:  And that’s how women acquired power in publishing, incidentally.  They did sub-rights and they did publicity.  Little did anybody know that those were going to be the money centers in the future.
However, John Farrar was there and he was a lovely man, a recovering alcoholic, I believe.  He’d had an earlier publishing venture.  He gave a course, I think, at the Y for poets, and so I took that course because that’s how I envisaged myself.  That’s what I wanted to be.
Then we moved to St. Louis and I started taking, at my mother’s pushing, a doctorate.

Q:  Your husband was in medical school at that point?

Kafka:  Yes, in St. Louis, and so I was at Washington University, which had a perfectly filthy bad English department, whereas Harvard had had a wonderful department, although they didn’t teach American literature per se.  But I wrote my honors thesis on Emily Dickinson.  Still these many years later, here is Emily Dickinson.  That’s the [Brenda] Wineapple [book] that I’m reading.
Anyhow, I started taking a doctorate in seventeenth century English literature, which I loved, and I’d had Douglas Bush at Harvard for that at Wash U.  It was a seminar course, and the man who taught the course had us all reading microfilm.  I don’t know if you’ve ever worked on microfiche.

Q:  Yes.  Why were you doing that?

Kafka:  Because he had us reading Commonplace Books, because I think he thought we would discover the unpublished Donne poem and that would—

Q:  Make everybody—

Kafka:  No, make him.

Q:  Yes, I realize but—

Kafka:  No, he wouldn’t have given credit.  And in my typical charming fashion, I got through one of these sessions, or halfway through, and he called on me and I said, “If you were teaching contemporary American literature, we would all be reading the Ladies’ Home Journal.”

Q:  How did that go over?  [laughs]

Kafka:  That was the end of that.  I was nutty as a fruitcake, incidentally.  I really was very odd at that point.  I was alone.  I didn’t know St. Louis.  I didn’t know people.

Q:  You mean you didn’t have the support system of friends and family.

Kafka:  Nothing, no.  And I was odd, no doubt about it, I was odd.
Anyhow, so I sort of took to my bed for a little bit, and then I got a job at Ozark Airlines in the PR department, doing their company newsletter mainly for employees, and we worked on a linotype machine setting hot type.  That was work.

Q:  I know.

Kafka:  You ever worked on a linotype?

Q:  I wasn’t allowed to touch it, but, yes, I know what they were like.

Kafka:  Bad, bad.  And finally I got a job at the C.V. Mosby Company.

Q:  What was the C.V. Mosby Company?

Kafka:  C.V. Mosby Company was the only publishing company in St. Louis.  I mean, I was still on track trying to be a writer, and the C.V. Mosby Company was a medical journal and book publisher, and still exists, I believe, and was one of the largest in the country, and they made me a proofreader.  I had no idea how to read proof, but I knew how to read books.  So I went and I got a copy of the Oxford Guide to Proofreading, which has all the marks in it, and I started proofreading.  It was wonderful training for writing cookbooks.

Q:  I bet it was.

Kafka:  Not only the proofreading, but the exactness that in medical texts, if you don’t get it right, people can die.  As a matter of fact, I had a fight with a contributor to a symposium, it was an eye surgeon, it was a group of eye surgeons, and he refused to change the description of an operation.  I said, “You know what you mean, but this could be read just the opposite way.”  And he wouldn’t change it.  I finally had to go to management and had them say they would have to get a lawyer and he would have to sign a release.
While I was at that, I always had a talent for finding people, and we lived in an apartment, up four flights, I think.  I spent a lot of my life walking up four flights.  It was fairly near the medical school, and the man who owned it was a fabulous man called Fred Landesman.  His son, Rocco Landesman [now the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts] is [unclear], and Fred was a painter, a self-made man.  His mother had a tacky sort of secondhand shop and was a picker.  He started Gaslight Square, and in his first restaurant, the Crystal Palace, which then moved to Gaslight Square, they were nightclubs, and he had brought the Second City Compass people from Chicago.

Q:  So the Crystal Palace was a what?

Kafka:  It was a restaurant and cabaret, because he was interested in the arts and theater.  He lived in a Sullivan house with one of those great arches over the doorway.

Q:  Very nice.

Kafka:  He had a ballroom on the top floor, and he regularly had people coming through there.  Of course, Tennessee Williams, when he left home, went there.  I didn’t meet Tennessee Williams.  But he was another one of these important influences and men who believed in me.  Tried to seduce me; I wasn’t seduced.  I probably would have been if I’d known more, but I wasn’t.  But I remained friends with him and his wife.  She was busy being seduced by other people.
His brother was a man, another Landesman, who started a magazine called Neurotica in New York.  I mean, they were fabulous people.  Herb Gold was out there before he moved to California.  He was one of Paula Landesman’s lovers.  So in that sense, I found people, but they were not friends or relatives.  It was a different kind of thing.

Q:  I understand.  Now, where and what were you eating?  Were you and your husband able to eat together?

Kafka:  Well, I cooked.  We had two burners and a sink, you know, like in a closet.  And I always cooked for people.  I never cooked for myself.  All these people who say, “I go home and I make myself a wonderful meal,” that’s not me.  That’s not I.

Q:  Why is that?

Kafka:  Because my impulse is sharing, including, giving.  I still think of food as a gift.  I think of my writing and my restaurants as things I give.  May be self-aggrandizing, but that’s the way I think of it.
And we had no money.  But I would put a blanket on the floor.  We had two rooms that opened out into each other, and I would put a blanket on the floor, and I had two burners.  So I would make pasta and a pasta sauce and a salad and a bottle of wine, and we would sit on the floor and eat.  And that I remember.
When we went out—again, we had really no money.  I think we went maybe once or twice to the Chase, which was the big hotel then, still is, I think, on the park.  St. Louis had been very rich.  It had been the way up from the South.

[Interruption]

Kafka:  I don’t know where I was.

Q:  When you went out, you didn’t have any money either, so—

Kafka:  Right.  However, as I say, I was never color-conscious, or at least not negatively.  I wasn’t stupid.  The name of my favorite place was the Pig Meat Café.

Q:  Sounds great.

Kafka:  I assure you I was the only white woman in the place.  And we went to Fred’s places, and we got a deal.  He would put the entertainers up on the fourth floor in another apartment.  So I met Greta Keller, who was the pre-Marlena Dietrich, an Austrian and still performed, that Fred had found.  He dug her up, practically literally.  I met Nichols and May, and then we had a connection because Severn Darden had been at a school in Massachusetts, and my husband had known people who were also sent to the school for difficult people, and so we knew Seve, who was brilliantly funny.
Then my husband had saved up all his time for self-chosen courses, and we went off to London, and he went to Queens Square, which is the great neurological hospital.  His mother had multiple sclerosis, so it was somewhat over-determined.  She, incidentally, was a great baker—maybe that’s why I don’t bake—and she was a good cook and she was a pianist and all those things, but then could not do them.  But she did cook for her family until she became incapacitated.
We found an apartment, very cold.  London was still suffering the aftermath in 1958 of the war.  When we left London—no, I’d been to Europe before.  Not true.  I had been to Europe when I was sixteen with a girls’ group, and we went to Italy, I had Italian food, and then we went to Paris, and there I saw Jacques again, and I saw another fascinating group of people.  And then I went to Europe again.  When I went then, it was really a terrible time still in Paris, and I was in Paris when the Plâce de la Concorde was black.  There were no lights.  And I was there the night they turned on the Eiffel Tower lights.

Q:  Oh, how thrilling.

Kafka:  And there was a bottle in lights on the side.  It was a Perrier bottle.  Perrier had paid for this in the ad.  L’eau qui vas Pschitt.  And that was extraordinary and exciting.

Q:  Meanwhile, what were you seeing your own future as at that point?

Kafka:  To be a poet.  Then we went to England with that group, where it was very poor, and we went on a boat, a ferry, across to Holland, and I will never forget the breakfast buffet in the Holland station of the ferry, with a typical Dutch breakfast, ham, cheese, chocolate, nothing that you could get in England or France.  So they had recovered from the war much more quickly.
Years later we went on our honeymoon in the summer, and we went on the boat, of course.  My father had been on the China Clipper for business going to France, and we went on the boat and we went to France, landed, and then we drove down through France, down into Spain, through Spain, where my husband got—

Q:  Something.

Kafka:  Well, no, not just the trots, a really bad infection, and I thought he was going to die, brand-new husband.  And then he got better, found a doctor through the American consul.  I guess we were, I don’t know, Barcelona, someplace on the coast, and they gave me the name of a doctor who they said spoke English, which is what I’d asked for.  So I called, and he came to the hotel because my husband clearly could not go there, and the hotel was pretty much closed.  It was summer and nobody went to these hot hotels in those days.  And he didn’t speak English.  He had written papers with an English co-author.  Anyhow, he gave him Coca-Cola and he gave him some opium, which is what they had in those days, no Imodium.  But he needed it anyhow, and no antibiotics yet.  He got better, but he went raving out of his mind in the middle of the night with the opium and the fever and started speaking German in the voice of a child.
So then we drove across Europe, and we went to Vienna, which was his childhood home, and in Vienna we hadn’t made a hotel reservation, and he stopped at the only thing that looked like a hotel that was open.  When he told them, they said, sure, he could have a room, and then when he said he was going to go get his wife, they started to laugh, because it was a whorehouse.  And we finally found a hotel.  So Vienna was still poor.
I had been to Europe my senior year, the year I graduated from college.  I had been going out with Ernie, and I had broken up with him, and I saw him briefly.

Q:  Was he at Harvard when you were at Radcliffe?

Kafka:  Yes, that’s where we met. When we married, he was in medical school in St. Louis. Is final year we went to London. I then got a job, through my mother, working for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was still then in London.  The dollar was very powerful in those days.  You have to remember how rich we were compared to the rest of the world.  So on all of these trips, I ate because it was cheap, and I didn’t live in places with kitchens.

Q:  These trips took place in between school years?

Kafka:  When I was in high school, when I was in college, and then on my honeymoon, and then with Ernie in the last year of medical school.  When he was in medical school, we did have a kitchen, but none of those other times did I have a kitchen.  So we went out to eat, and one ate very well for very little money, and I continued [to be] a Francophile.

Q:  And your standards for eating presumably had been set by the food that you ate at home as a child and by the restaurants that you were exposed to?

Kafka:  Yes, and by Ducky’s food.  He had French food in his house.  I mean, he didn’t make it, but he had a person, une dame qui a fait la cuisine.  And the Polaceks had very good food.  So, yes, I always had good food.  I mean, not always.  I went to school.

Q:  Of course, I understand.  At what point did you realize that your interest was more than just—

Kafka:  I didn’t.

Q:  You didn’t?  Okay.

Kafka:  I really didn’t.  When we returned from Europe, my husband did his internship and residency, and I got a job working at Mademoiselle.

Q:  So you were here?

Kafka:  Yes, being a copy editor, and then I went to S & S as a copy editor.  And I never could spell, so I became a fabulous copy editor because I looked up everything.  But I worked for a woman at Mademoiselle who was a brilliant copy editor.  She then went on to be the copy editor of Scientific American, which was quite a job.  And it was a different world.  Rita Smith was the fiction editor, and her sister was a three-name woman who was crippled, from the South—it will come to me—and Cicely was the Features Editor—anyhow, Leo Lerman I met there.  Leo was terribly important to me, and he is the fulcrum that you’re looking for.  He was a contributing editor.  I used to work very late because I had nothing else to do, and he was working late one night.  He had a cubicle.  We had an office with a window because of Sally Jenks, and he called me into his cubicle.  I had edited some of his copy, very rococo writing.  This was the days of “dear” and “darling.”  He said, “Tell me, darling, you want to write, don’t you?”
	I said, “Yes, Mr. Lerman. Yes, yes.”
	And he said, “Well, I’ll send you to Allene Talmey at Vogue.”  Allene was the features editor at Vogue.
And I said, “Oh, thank you.”
	And he looked at me and said, “And tell me, dear, what are you going to tell them that you write about?”
	And I thought, and I said, “Oh, Mr. Lerman, I will write about art.  All my friends are painters.”  I mean, this was, after all, the end of the fifties, and the beginning of the sixties, art was the most exciting thing happening in New York in those days.
	And he said, “No, darling, you’re not going to write about art for Vogue.”
	I said, “But Mr. Lerman, you told me.”
	And he said, “She writes about art for Vogue.  You’re not going to write about art for Vogue.”
And I sort of metaphorically threw up my hands.  I had been in the habit of bringing in a pâté or a foodie gift, because, as I say, to me food was a gift.  And I said, “You tell me what I should write about.”
	And he said to me, “Tell her you write about food.  You cook divinely.”

Q:  Interesting.

Kafka:  So I went off a few days later to see Ms. Talmey, who was a beast out of nature, if you read—what’s her name, the woman the ended up on the editorial page of the Times and wrote a piece about when we were young, a book, and she has a vivid portrait of Mrs. Talmey.  I went into her office.  I was really shaky.  She was my height, so that wasn’t the problem.  She distinguished herself by not wearing a hat in the office.  All the lady editors in those days wore hats to distinguish themselves from the peons who worked there, who, of course, were not paid very much.  They were supposed to be supported by their families, who were supposed to be of a caliber that Vogue would appreciate, which was not true at Mademoiselle.  Mademoiselle had the college competition in those days and so forth.
And she said to me—she did not ask me to sit down—“Tell me, dear, if I let,”—you get the operative verb—“you write for Vogue, what would you write about?”
	Well, I had the answer to that.  I’d been primed.  I said, “Oh, Mrs. Talmey, I would write about food.”
	“And tell me, dear, if I let you write about food for Vogue, what would you write about?”  I hadn’t got a clue.  He didn’t tell me I had to have story ideas prepared.  But I was a quick study.  I’d studied comparative literature.  So I gave her two comp lit ideas.  One was about sweet and sour foods from different parts of the world, and one was about food wrapped in dough from different parts of the world, hence the strudel dough.
	And she said, “All right,” and she commissioned them.

Q:  That was pretty creative of you to come up with those.

Kafka:  Well, that’s never been the problem.  Other inhibitions, but not that.
So I started to go, and I’m almost at the door, and she said to me, “I find it often helps to start with a quotation.”
	Well, I had never written a food piece.  I’d never written a recipe.  I had no idea where to begin.  Research I knew how to do.  So I went down to Fourth Avenue, which in those days had all the used bookstores, and I bought—you can still see them on the way out—compendiums of quotations.

Q:  I see.  [laughs]

Kafka:  I knew how to do research.  So I did research on quotations.  About two months later, I got a call from Mrs. Talmey.  She said, “Tell me, dear, when am I going to get those articles?”
Well, nothing concentrates the mind so well as a deadline.  I went into the kitchen.  I started cooking.  I’d eaten enough food in my life, and I have very good taste memory, and there were always books to read.  So I developed recipes, and then I had the good sense to read Vogue and see what they’re writing, having not known that she was the arts editor.  I knew enough to do the research to see how they wrote recipes in an article, and I wrote the article and I wrote the recipes.  And she published it, and she didn’t change a word.  Then, emboldened, I wrote the second piece, which was harder since, as I say, I am not a natural baker.  But I wasn’t doing sweet things anyhow.

Q:  Now, this has been written about a little bit, saying that you wrote the first food piece with recipes for Vogue, but it doesn’t sound like—

Kafka:  No, no, no, no.  My first piece was—no.  Maxime McKendry, who was Loulou de la Falaise’s mother, was the food writer before me.

Q:  At Vogue?

Kafka:  At Vogue.  And she was a very good cook, and it was her brother who owned Annabel’s and various other clubs and restaurants.  Mark Birley and her father was a bad painter and her first husband was a bad sculptor, and then she married McKendry, who was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum.  I don’t know whether she had a falling-out with Allene or what it was, but eventually she went back to Europe, and so they needed a food writer.
So Allene gave me these two articles and I wrote them at the same time. Leo was a contributing editor to Playbill, which was in the theaters in those days, and in those days it was weekly.  And so he got me a job, which paid bupkes, to review restaurants, which I did.  I lost money, as I do with most things, because I wouldn’t take comp meals, and this was deemed insane at the time.

Q:  That was way ahead of your time, really.

Kafka:  Right.  I was deemed insane.

Q:  Yes, that was great.

Kafka:  The PR people would call me and ask me to go.

Q:  That was fantastic.

Kafka:  And I’d say, “I’ll come, but you can’t—” I didn’t even know the word “comp.”  “You can’t treat me to the meal.”  Unlike Clementine Paddleford, who was then reviewing restaurants and who used to go in this swaggering cape.  She was quite a character.  Did you read this biography of hers?

Q:  No.

Kafka: Very good.  She would go into a restaurant where she might have even been the year before, and she would order, and everybody would pretend not to recognize her.  And at the end of the meal, she would get up and go like this and say, “I’m Clementine Paddleford and I want to see your kitchen.”  And, of course, there would be no check.
I think Leo thought he was giving me a sinecure, that I would have all this food because we were still young, but I wouldn’t do it.

Q:  Well, that was very smart and probably very unusual.

Kafka:  Well, I made a brief career about going around.  I forget, following a food writer for Food & Wine, going around after him and writing pieces that were not essentially paid for, and it was considered acceptable at the time.  Nobody paid for their own meals.  Gourmet may have paid for the meals, may have paid for the Chamberlains’ trip to France.  Narcisse, the daughter, who was an editor at Morrow—I think I would have known.  But that was much later.  I mean, I didn’t know about—that was during the Second World War that McAllister started Gourmet. 

Q:  So you were writing these pieces.

Kafka:  Every week.

Q:  Every week?

Kafka:  Every week.  Three restaurants often—

Q:  Every week for Vogue?

Kafka:  No, for Playbill.

Q:  For Playbill, oh, I’m sorry.  Okay, every week for Playbill, okay.  Got it.

Kafka:  No, Vogue was recipe pieces at that point in time.

Q:  These were restaurant reviews?

Kafka:  For Vogue?

Q:  No, for Playbill.

Kafka:  Yes, it was restaurant reviews.  It was all restaurant reviews.  Yes, I was very inventive.  I did restaurants in—and I remember because it was certainly unheard of—in museums.

Q:  Smart.

Kafka:  The Guggenheim had the best food, I remember that.

Q:  And how did you see this work fitting into your life as a writer?

Kafka:  I’d been working as a copy editor.  It was better than working as a copy editor only.  It made some money.  I was still writing poetry.  As I say, when I was at Farrar Strauss, I used to go to John Farrar’s seminar, which was a group thing where everybody read their poetry and so forth.
We lived on 67th Street at that point between Lexington and 3rd, opposite the firehouse.  Actually, it was a wonderful building—it still is—130 East 67th, but in those days nobody wanted to live there because the firehouse was opposite.  There was a schul down the block on the same side, and the Russian Embassy has its people there.

Q:  That’s quite a combination.

Kafka:  And there were all these policemen there, and, of course, the Armory was across the street.  But Lehman Brothers, the wine store before they sold to Sherry, was on Madison and 67th, and for my husband’s birthday I decided to go for broke and I went into Lehman to buy him a great bottle of wine, and I said, “I want to buy a wonderful bottle of wine.”
And so the salesman called a young man up out of the cellar, and it was Bob Haas, Robert Haas, who was another great influence in my life, and I explained to him what I wanted and he presented me—well, he didn’t present, it was not a gift—with a 1952 La Tâche which I remember vividly was fifty dollars, and I was prepared to spend more.  And I said, “Is that the best?”  I didn’t know.
	And he said, “Unless you want to spend thousands on 1919,” which I’d already drunk in my time.  But we became friends.  His then-wife was interested in music, and we used to go to concerts together, and I began to know a good deal more about wine.  I had lost my stint at Vogue, which I’ll tell you about, but in any case, he’d gotten me a job being the editor of the American edition of Revue des Vins de France

Q:  I was going to ask you what that was.

Kafka:  Well, Revue des Vins de France was a very important French wine journal, which at that point edited by a woman who had been the secretary to the man who started it, whose name is escaping me at the moment, who had been a wine salesman as [unclear] was and so forth, and had made some of the great wine lists of France.  When I was young, you could still see those wine lists.  Because of the war and one thing or another, the spines, they were still there.  So foreign wine I’d tasted, French wine and what have you.
Then Bobby suggested to me that I do something about American wine, and I hadn’t heard of American wine.  But I think Frank Schoonmaker had already written that book; maybe not.  He’d certainly written German Wine, and German wine, I had written about, read, and written about, and drunk German wine.

Q:  For?

Kafka:  For Revue des Vins de France.

Q:  The French or American edition?

Kafka:  The American edition.

Q:  What was the American edition?  

Kafka:  Translation plus articles commissioned here.  And since I was fluent in French, and so was Bobby, I could vet the translation and see what was appropriate and what was wrong, whether it was good,

Q:  So was that a full-time job?

Kafka:  Nothing was a full-time job.

Q:  Yes.  It sounds like it should have been a full-time job, yes.

Kafka:  No, I was doing that after—that was relatively late.  I’m skipping around in history.  I met Bobby in the fifties, but I think we were already living here in 1964 when I started editing IV.  And that was still very early for American wine.  And then I started—the Four Seasons had those wine tastings, those barrel tastings.  Bobby lived in Mamaroneck/Rye, but he used to give a party with me at my apartment, so I must still have been at 67th Street, but it was before I was editing.

Q:  And this would have been approximately when?

Kafka:  1964, I moved in here.

Q:  Here?

Kafka:  Here, and lived on 67th until that time.  But I’d been accumulating knowledge, the great capital.

Q:  And still writing poetry, or no?

Kafka:  Still writing poetry.  I wrote poetry, and then I had children.

Q:  That will do it, right.

Kafka:  I was very reluctant to have children for that reason.

Q:  You knew it was going to impinge on your work time?

Kafka:  There’s an egotism required in poetry.

Q:  Absolutely.

Kafka:  And you have to isolate yourself.  I had a lot of isolated time because of Ernie’s work, and then I wouldn’t have any, and one couldn’t be selfish in that way.  My mother had been selfish in that way, and I would not be.  That was one of the things I would not do.  But in any case, I continued dicking around with food stuff.

Q:  Meaning what?  Writing, you mean, or what?

Kafka:  Yes.  And when I had our daughter, I used to go to Central Park, right?  And I met a park mother.  In the meantime, I had an idea for a cookbook, a very good idea—it’s still a good idea—and I went to see—maybe Leo sent me—the man who owned Dial and Dell, and gave him this idea and he bought it.

Q:  And what was that?

Kafka:  It was an idea to start with three kitchen implements, in this case, a sauté pan, a wooden spoon, and a peppermill.  Those were my choice of the first three.  And then to describe how you should buy them, what they were, and give three recipes for using them, and by the end of the book you have a basically equipped kitchen, a basic compendium of recipes, and then there would be more recipes in back that would be keyed to the place in the book where you could presumably do them, where you had the technique.  So three items, three techniques, and three recipes.  And I don’t think I knew enough.
But in any case, in the park I met Charlotte Sheedy, who’s now a literary agent, I think she still is, and we were both wheeling children.  Her daughter was Ali Sheedy, the actress.  Charlotte had worked for the president of Dial Dell.  So one day, she came to me, and she said, “There’s a job.”  Because the kids were somewhat bigger; they were in kindergarten or what have you, whatever, at least half a day and probably Nicole a whole day already.  She said, “It’s one you might like to do.”
By that time, she was living on Central Park West instead of on East 96th Street, and it turned out that her downstairs upstairs neighbor was Burt Wolf, and he had had the idea, which he’d sold.  He was a con artist—still is—of the first order.  He had sold this idea for The Cooks’ Catalogue, and he described it to me and told me it had been sold and asked me if I—we are approaching Jim Beard—

Q:  I realize that.  [laughs]

Kafka:  He asked me if I would like to edit it.  Charlotte had thought I could do it, because this idea for this book was about equipment, and still I had no fear of new activities in those days.  But I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave home yet, so I asked for more money than I thought I could ever get, which was five hundred dollars a week.

Q:  When you say you weren’t sure that you wanted to leave home, meaning on a daily basis?

Kafka:  For the children, yes.  No, I wasn’t Emily Dickinson.  But it was when I found myself standing inside that door there waiting for the children to come home, that I decided it was not a healthy relationship.
So I got my five hundred dollars a week, and I went to work for Beard Glaser Wolf.  I was taken down on my first day, or my second day, to meet Mr. Beard, to be vetted.  He was already living on 12th Street, but he had his office in those days on the ground floor, and there was no spiral staircase as there is today.  You had to go up the outside public staircase.  He had two floors, Gino had a floor, and he had tenants on the fourth floor.
He sat me down and we began talking, and he was charming as he could be and extremely intelligent.  That’s what nobody remembers to say about Jim, which is very important, is the level of intelligence.  Not just the memory, but the intelligent memory, the ability to understand, to codify, to make connections.  We began a conversation, it was very nice, and he said, “Well, what did you cook yesterday?”  And I told him I’d made a pâté, and he asked what kind of fat I’d used.  And I told him I’d used kidney fat, and he got furious.  He said, “You can’t use kidney fat.  It breaks.”  I mean, he was a huge man with a fierce temper.
	And I said, “But, Mr. Beard, I did.  If you put it between two sheets of wax paper and roll it.”  And he got up and stormed, with these great huge boat-like feet, out into the hall and shouted at Burt, “I can’t work with her.  I can’t work with this woman.”  I did not know then that the prior editor of this project had been José Wilson, and José had been the English woman who did Beard’s writing at that point.  If you read Beard, you’ll realize that nobody really did his writing, that he did tapes or he did interviews, and the voice is always his own no matter, who wrote it, putatively.
Jackie Mallorca, who has a book that just came out, was another English woman who was living in California after José disappeared from the scene. Alcoholic.  There was a lot of alcoholism in publishing in those days.  She had been the editor of House and Garden.  He got me a gig, because I was still freelancing, writing an article for House and Garden.  They had those cookbook inserts.
In any case, he got halfway up the stairs, I’m putting on my coat like this, Burt is there, and I hear him turn around, and he comes down, the only time I’ve ever heard him apologize.  He said, “I’m sorry.  I’ve been in a foul mood all day.”
	And we became—I can’t say we were friends; we were a cohort.  He took me out to teach with him in California.  I never asked him what he was going to pay me.  After expenses, he split the take half and half, and continued to do that.  I never asked him about money, and he was always fair with me.  He came a few times to dinner.  We would go out to lunch a lot, because he was writing reviews, and besides which, he never paid for anything.  So we would go to the Coach House or someplace else, the Four Seasons, where he was known.
When I was editing Revue des Vins de France, which was earlier, Bob suggested that I interview Joe Baum.  You see how the people were so important to me?  He said, “He has a wonderful wine cellar.”  In those days, he was still at R. A.  So I did an interview with Mr. Baum, also at the Coach House, which had a very good wine cellar.  Leon had a marvelous wine cellar, probably the first with American wines as well.  Joe, because of the Four Seasons, was very interested in American things, native produce, native recipes, grew herbs on the roof of the Four Seasons, the Seagram Building, had John Cage out picking wild mushrooms, had a terrific fight with John Cage because John Cage wanted to be paid differentially by the rarity of the mushroom.

Q:  Oh, my god.

Kafka:  And Joe said he couldn’t do that because it was—in any case, I mean, those were the days when most of the things we think of were not in stores, or many of the things.  Other things were that were better than today.  The pork, all this brouhaha now about these fat pigs from—I remember when all pork was fat and it was cheap.  Then they decided to turn it into “the other white meat.”
In any case, so I did an interview with Joe, and then I didn’t see him again till Beard Glaser Wolf, where he was a consultant.  And then I had a fight with Burt after I’d really written the book.  I mean, I hired people, but I insisted on paying for-- the same goddamned thing again--for the equipment or sending it back.  And Burt, after a while, didn’t have the money.  I mean, he was really a thief in many ways.  That’s another whole long story.  He wasn’t paying the suppliers.

Q:  A common flaw.

Kafka:  So I quit.  Jim was very sympathetic, and he sent me to see Joe and to see George Lang, both of whom were restaurant consultants, and they both offered me jobs.  Joe was already down at the Trade Center, but Windows hadn’t been built, and he hired me to buy china, glass and silver tabletop—return to my father—not because he knew that, but he thought I could do it because I’d just been editing this book which was all about equipment and buying and so forth.

Q:  So when he hired you to do that, the china, the glass for the tables, would that have been your first foray into real restaurant consulting?

Kafka:  Any restaurant consulting.

Q:  Well, that’s what I meant, that technically that was—

Kafka:  Right.  I always did everything as a freelancer, and I’d had one other freelance—two.  One was at something Friedman down on Union Square, which was the big restaurant supply house, developing a cooking school for them.  And then I hired Jim to teach there.  No, I did not.  We gave a party for Jim’s birthday in the space.

Q:  Where was that space?

Kafka:  Union Square.  H. Friedman, I think it was.  I don’t remember the name.

Q:  It was like a storefront or something?

Kafka:  Well, it had a storefront, but that’s not what it was.  It was a wholesale restaurant supply house, pots and pans, china, glass, and silver, so on and so forth.  I had met them because of The Cooks’ Catalogue.  I also met Carl Sontheimer at that time, and I was doing Beard Glaser Wolf, who had just imported the Cuisinart, which I put on the cover of The Cooks’ Catalogue along with other things, obviously.

Q:  Now, that’s described as your having edited it, but it sounds like you wrote it.

Kafka:  I wrote it.  I did edit it.  I had writers.  I hired Irene Sax, who you know, and you can ask her.  I’m not making this up.  She was the wife of another analyst.  We went out to lunch when she told me she’d been co-authoring this book about table settings or what have you, and she was very down in the dumps, and I said, “Come work for me.”  Well, you have to have a feel for people, and she did, and she was wonderful.  She has no writer’s block.  She’s the only writer I’ve ever met—

Q:  It’s incredible.

Kafka:  —who has no writer’s block.  She sits down and she does it.

Q:  So she came to work for you as—

Kafka:  At Beard Glaser Wolf.  I would show her a piece of equipment that I had selected, found, somehow selected, because the first thing was to get the catalogues in and everything and read all of them.  I mean, I’m a compulsive to do it all.  And then when I selected it and had it sent in, then I’d choose among the variants, then Renie would—I would tell her what it was and why it was good, and then she would write the actual copy.  Flo Fab worked for me on one section and later claimed that she wrote the book and edited the book, which she didn’t, and then she worked with Burt on the update, and I’m happy to tell you it was a total failure.

Q:  Where were the original offices where you put out The Cooks’—

Kafka:  In the East Fifties between 2nd and 3rd someplace.

Q:  Did equipment get sent into you?

Kafka:  Yes, it was a great big loft space.

Q:  And could you describe, for the purposes of here, what the purpose of The Cooks’ Catalogue was?

Kafka:  Well, just as ingredients were scarce on the ground in those days, it was the period of graniteware.  Do you know what graniteware is?

Q:  I don’t think I know.

Kafka:  It’s the enamel pots that are thin and brown and white, blue and white, or black and white, stippled on thin metal.

Q:  I didn’t know that was granitewear.

Kafka:  Your grandmother’s roasting pan, which was terrible stuff because the enamel chipped and bugs could be harvested and there was no diffusion.
On my honeymoon with this brand-new husband in 1955, we went to the puces, the flea market, and I bought—I mean, I’ve always been a nut, I bought a complete batterie de cuisine for seventy-five dollars, all copper.

Q:  How did you get it back here?  Oh, my god.

Kafka:  My husband drove it all through Europe in the back of a quatre-chevaux.

Q:  Wow.

Kafka:  And then we came back on a boat, so it was no problem.  I’ll show it to you.  I still have it; don’t use it for testing.

Q:  But it’s great to have it.  That’s wonderful.

Kafka:  No, I use it for cooking.  But I don’t use it for testing, because it cooks so differently, and that’s not fair to people.  So there was always this leitmotif, if you want.
So then I went to work for Joe, and Joe had always worked with Jim.  He worked with him at the Four Seasons, and he hired him to work on Windows.  Jim really didn’t do much at Windows, but he—

Q:  When you went to work for Joe, Joe’s business at that point was restaurant—

Kafka:  No, no, no, no.  He had been president of Restaurant Associates and—no, he’d been—and the chairman had been Jerry Brody.  Jerry Brody was married to the daughter of Abe Wexler, who owned a coffee company, which owned various inexpensive restaurants.  And Jerry started this Restaurant Division, and he hired Joe, who was in Miami running a hotel restaurant, to come up and do the Newarker in the Newark airport.  Jerry was really the business partner, and Joe was always the creative partner.  He managed a feat of no mean—he turned it into a successful restaurant that people wanted to go to.
Then at one point, Jerry started branching out to Europe, and he opened a place in  Divonne-les-Bains, in a gambling place.  They had an office in Paris, and he began having an affair with the secretary there.  He went into Mr. Wexler’s office one day, and he said, “I just want you to know I’m going to ask your daughter for a divorce, but, of course, I’ll continue to work for you.”
Well, he had no idea about Jewish fathers.  Mr. Wexler said to him, “You will not continue working for me.  Out!”
	So he and Marlene were out of jobs.  But he’d put away quite a lot of money, and then he did the place in what was then the GM Building and so on and so forth.
But that left Joe in charge.  But Joe had been the creative director, really, of R. A.  He did the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, and he did the Four Seasons, and he did Zum Zum.  His parents owned a hotel with a restaurant in Saratoga.

Q:  Oh, I didn’t know that.

Kafka:  Oh yes.  I wrote about him someplace.  And then David Schine hired him for Schine Hotels.  At some point before he went to Miami, he went to the Lexington, which was on Lexington Avenue, still there in some form.  It was later, I think, he got Jerry to buy it.  I may be confusing time here.
In any case, he put in the Hawaiian Room and developed the Pu Pu Platter, and he had a slide down which you could go and slide, because it was in a basement space, and all that fusion food, he started.  I mean, Joe was an incredible genius about—he did much of the stuff at the World’s Fair and so on.

[End of interview] 








Kafka – 1 -  PAGE 1