Elaine's 1965

My first memories of Elaine's, where my father was a founding partner, from memoir-in-progress, There Are Places I'll Remember.

The earliest memories I have of Elaine’s are of the cellar, its heavy, clanging, black, diamond plate doors split wide, the worn cement steps down to the mingling smells of stale, puddle water, fresh linens tied together in stacks, onions piled in mesh bags, freshly ripped cardboard. And, of course, the walk-in, the frigid wonderland of plenty. I vividly recall my handsome, young father squatting in his crisp suit and shiny loafers, demonstrating for my sister and me, in deadly serious tones, how to escape from those frigid confines should we be accidentally shut in. We took turns pushing on the cold, dull metal plunger that released the latch on the outside, the scent of the damp wood walls, kegged beer, a hanging veal leg, and fresh strawberries tickling our noses. If for any reason the latch became stuck, we were instructed to shut the levered valves above the scarred and dented, aluminum kegs feeding the beer taps upstairs, drawing a bartender down to investigate. My sister and I were probably four and three years-old, respectively. Our father was teaching us how to save ourselves, a lesson he never quite learned for himself.

By this time my parents were already divorced, Elaine’s (and Tinker’s, the first bar my father opened at 74th and Second Avenue, with two of his brothers, in 1961) contributing to many of the irreconcilable differences. My “Irish twin” sister, Karin, and I spent most weekends with Dad, which generally began with him picking us up in a cab at the Work & Play Preschool across from Mom’s new apartment on West 82^nd St, and in later years at P.S. 87, on the way to “the store,” where we’d wander about entertaining ourselves, while he and Elaine led the set-up for the night. I can easily summon visions of Elaine lumbering about, a floral print flowing around her like a slackened sail, faux pearls spilling down into the abyss of her bosom, as she placed, “reserved” signs beside bright yellow, Ricard embossed ashtrays on the first few tables. I can still smell the heavy scent of powder when she scooped me up into her squishy lap, after settling at a front table to recount the register bank, while my father sprung around behind the bar restocking liquor and small wooden crates of tiny soda bottles.

A restaurant prepping to open has its own sense of time and rhythm, tasks performed at a smooth, steady clip in an atmosphere of anticipatory quiet, adrenaline slowly rising as it gets closer to proverbial curtain time. Because it is a form of theater, a nightly performance accentuated with lighting and music, each evening following the same script, but never duplicating events exactly. My father and Elaine were the show’s impresarios and lead characters. My sister and I were supporting players, but dad always made sure we felt like an integral part of the scene. When a best-selling author, Broadway playwright, or Park Avenue Princess made the usual polite inquiries upon being introduced to me, “How old is your son?” Where does he go to school?” Dad would promptly reply,

“Ask him yourself, he’s standing right in front of you.”

Other times, witnessing my discomfort at being mistaken for a little girl, due to my smooth, soft face and long, blond hair, he’d advise,

“Just pull down your pants and show them your joint!”

My face warm with embarrassment advancing to mortification, my child brain somehow intuited he was trying to instill his own defiant boldness in me, and I wished his effort had been more successful. It would take decades for me to understand how much of that persona was protective, the vulnerabilities it strove to defend.

As darkness fell, my sister and I ate at one of the big, round tables, Dad cutting up our veal Milanese with a squeeze of fresh lemon, salty French fries, made especially for us from fresh potatoes pressed through the intimidating, steel cutter bolted to the oily butcher block in the noisy kitchen awash in harsh fluorescence. When we were a little older, but not much, we might be allowed a tiny bit of watered-down wine with dinner,

“Like all the kids in Europe,” my father would confirm for anyone who questioned the custom.

Dad was big on inclusion, in all its forms. For better and for worse. His approach to parenting, influenced by newly popular, anti-establishment ideology, involved treating children with the respect afforded adults, hiding nothing from them, along with a belief that a less restrictive approach to alcohol and marijuana experimentation would prevent abuse later on. Sharing my father’s theory never failed to get a robust laugh in recovery meetings decades later.

When Dad took his place at the door, bowing deeply to kiss the hand of an East Side Social Queen, or bracing himself to catch Rudolph Nureyev as he leapt across the threshold into his arms, my sister and I were set loose to scurry about a forest of adult legs, grubbing “house quarters” – brushed with a splotch of red nail polish to differentiate them from revenue when the coin box was emptied – from Ray the bartender to feed into the glowing, Seeburg jukebox. The jukebox was the alter at which we worshiped. It’s bright colors, the heavy clunk of the coins dropping in, the rectangular, plastic buttons that clicked in with a sturdy push, the shiny black 45s whirring by till the mechanical arm identified the song we’d chosen by memory, G4, B7 or F9. We loved “Downtown” by Petula Clark and Nancy Sinatra’s, “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” which we pantomimed along to. But it was The Beatles who got the vast majority of our red quarter plays. In those early days it was, “She Loves You…” - “She lubs you yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…” was the way my first attempt at a song emerged from my lips, according to my father - “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” or the flip side, “I saw Her Standing There.”

As John Lennon’s driving rhythm guitar and jubilant, melodic howl - “as I held her hand in mi-iiiine!” - infused the room with an electric charge, I watched my father ascend to another form on that six square foot patch of floor at the entrance. He became a blur of finely choreographed movement, red hair flying, paisley necktie swinging, cufflinks twinkling, warm hugs, hearty handshakes, delicate hands kissed, shouts out to waiters, Elio and Nicola, in perfect Italian, “Attenzione!” “Andiamo!” funneling the inhabitants of New York City newsrooms, publishing houses, film sets, photography lofts, recording studios, and society luncheons toward the back, where Elaine policed the proceedings while trading bon mots with Jack Richardson and Bruce Jay Freidman, making sure checks were paid, tables turned, stuffing wads of bills in her massive bra.

To my young eyes my father was the brightest sun in a constellation of stars, loved by all, wanted, needed, desired a prince of the greatest city in the world at its mid-century zenith.

When it got late and raucous enough that it was time to go home, even for kids as precocious as us, my father would pull a twenty from the register, put us in a cab, and tell the driver to keep the change from what was probably a four-dollar fair. He’d phone ahead to the Riverside Drive apartment for us to be met downstairs by the live-in housekeeper, and part-time, “manny,” who everyone knew as “Sherbert.” A wire-thin, Trinidadian, black man, 120 pounds soaking wet who moved like a spooked cat, Daniel Danielle apparently earned his nickname when describing himself to a potential romantic interest as “chocolate sherbert.” Years later, I learned from my Uncle Kevin that he’d found Sherbert in St. Thomas looking for a job and sent him up to New York to work as a porter at the original Ward family bar, Tinker’s, where he slept in the basement till my father took him in. Sherbert had a dramatic nature, prone to emotional extremes when he drank, but he was fiercely loyal to Dad, and protective of us kids. We found him to be hilarious. Before we could make it to the cab, however, we had to face the front table gauntlet, my father insisting we say a proper good night to those favored customers seated at the first few tables. David Halberstam was easy enough, a kind smile and a wink during a pause in deep conversation about corruption in the national security apparatus. Tommy Smothers might offer a pat on the head and a funny face, but spying Shelley Winters near the door I braced for the squishy hugs and sloppy kisses we knew were coming.

My father’s apartment was on the 7^th floor of a corner, prewar building, a “classic six,” two bedrooms, a maid’s room off the eat-in kitchen, a formal dining room, and living room with a pair of large, bay windows offering sweeping, southwesterly views of Riverside Park and the Hudson. It had come to him through a girlfriend he’d moved in with sometime after my parents’ divorce, a bright, gentle-voiced, petite blonde named, Andrea, who made a living as a hair model. She’d grown up in the apartment, and when she and my father split up, she opted to leave the $165 a month, rent-controlled apartment to him, perhaps having something to do with her artist father having leapt to his death from one of the big, living room windows some years before. I don’t remember how old I was when I learned about Andrea’s father, but young enough to be confounded by the entire concept of killing oneself. When first hearing the word “suicide,” I mashed it up in my head with a dish from our local Chinese restaurant, Hunan Balcony: “suey-cide.” He committed “suey-cide.” To this day I am terrified of heights.

The master bedroom was just off the entrance, its space dominated by a rare for the period California King bed, resting on a custom built three-foot high platform. We all called this the “Big Daddy Bed,” and it was where we slept when we spent weekends at our Dad’s place, though I eventually came to understand the bed’s expansive acreage made it attractive for less wholesome activities at the group level. As often as not, my father would bring whoever was left in Elaine’s at closing time, along with the cabdriver, home to continue the party. Occasionally, the distant murmur of excited conversation, laughter and music at the far end of the apartment would wake me and incite my curiosity. Following the jangly tambourine and swirling Hammond organ of Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” down the fifty-foot hallway to the living room, I’d pass the primary bathroom to find mountains of ice and frost-coated, green Heineken bottles occupying the long, deep tub where my sister and I could almost swim around one another during bubble baths. Tiptoeing past Sherbert’s room, I’d conceal myself at the kitchen entrance to the dining room, peeking across it through the grand arch to the living room.

Among a couple of dozen chattering grown-ups I’d spot my father on the long, low sofa, tie gone, shirt unbuttoned to the navel, beer in hand, Marlboro burning in the other, a girlfriend who may have been Julianna or Vivianna - there had been both at one time or another – in a low-cut exotic print, silk dress, her braless-ness the outfit’s dominant feature, beside him telling a story in either a Spanish or Italian accent between tokes on a small, silver pipe. In the corner was a four-foot square box with a plexiglass face, illuminated from within by colorful light patterns that seemed to change with the beat of the music. A pixie-blond in a mini-skirt who looked like, or could easily have been, It-girl model, Twiggy, would be twirling to the music in the center of the room, wine glass raised above her head. A black man with a Sly Stone afro wearing a daishiki and yellow tinted sunglasses could be found rolling a joint on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited, beside an unidentifiable couple entwined in an oversized chair. A guy with horn-rimmed glasses and a rumpled blazer leaned against the bookcase examining Dad’s book collection like Owl Eyes in the Great Gatsby, a character I’d eventually learn was based on my great grandfather, Ring Lardner. But unlike Gatsby’s, Dad’s books were genuine, an eclectic assortment including signed first editions from author friends, giant art books, a whole shelf crammed with volumes of The Encyclopedia Brittanica, an ancient, faded, gold-colored dictionary fraying at the binding that I’d use as a step stool to reach the magical Robert Louis Stevenson volumes with the striking N.C. Wyeth illustrations, “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped,” or my favorite book of all, Lewis Carroll’s “Through The Looking Glass.” My father had read it to me so many times I’d memorized a couple of stanzas of “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and would pretend, most notably to myself, that I was able to read at age three.

When finally discovered, my father would scoop me up, “What are you doing out of bed my fine fat son? Let me tuck you back in my beautiful child-ine.” Down the hall we went, as he continued, “Do you know that I love you more than anything else in the whole wide world…?” But I didn’t really want to leave that room. It was the side of the looking glass on which I would always feel most alive.

The time has come,' the Walrus said,

To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

And whether pigs have wings.'