Ferrone– 1 - 1
TTT
Interviewee: John Ferrone
Interviewer: Judith Weinraub
Session #1
New York City
Date: March 3, 2009
Q: It’s March third. I’m with John Ferrone at his home on West 13th Street in the
Village, and we’re going to begin our interview now.
John, if you could just tell me where and when you were born and tell me a little
something about your early life and education, and then we’ll go on from there.
Ferrone: I’ll start at the very, very beginning. I was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in
a hospital and grew up in a small town in Morris County, Rockaway, not to be confused
with Rockaway in New York, population four thousand. So I’m really a small-town boy.
I was the youngest of five children in an immigrant Italian family. My mother
and father both immigrated. My mother arrived when she was nine, so she was really
quite Americanized by the time I came along. My father spoke very little English. I
never had a conversation with him in all of my life; my mother used to interpret for us.
Q: How old was he when he came to this country?
Ferrone: Around nineteen. My mother was a good cook, intuitive cook. Because she
arrived in this country when she was nine, she didn’t come armed with a treasury of
Italian recipes. Everything she cooked that was Italian, my father taught her. We only
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had spaghetti, as it was called, never pasta. We had spaghetti once a week, so we were
pretty Americanized, and we were helped along in that regard by an older sister who was
determined that we were not going to be ordinary immigrants. She was pretty culturalminded. She went to concerts and lectures, and encouraged my creativity.
Q: How much older was she?
Ferrone: Thirteen years older. She more or less raised me. She was my surrogate
mother.
I went to the local high school, graduated at the head of my class, and had two
small jobs before I went off to the war. First, I worked at a sporting goods store which
sold records, and I ran the record department. Then I got a job as a secretary at an iron
ore mine. There were no women employed there, so I was the secretary till I went off to
World War II at the age of nineteen, and I served for close to three years. I was with an
outfit called the Radio Security Detachment. We monitored our own radio transmissions
for violations of security.
Q: Where was this?
Ferrone: We were all over the United States. I went to school, radio school, in Madison,
Wisconsin, and was transferred to Drew Field in Florida. I was at Fort Meade in
Maryland, Peterson Field in Colorado Springs, spent some time in Arlington just before
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going overseas for an intensive course, a high security course, and was there when
Roosevelt died.
Q: In Arlington?
Ferrone: Yes. Shipped overseas with a small group from my outfit in spring of 1944.
No, wrong. I think it was ’45. It was my first trip on a plane, and it was a 7,000-mile trip
in bucket seats.
Q: Destination?
Ferrone: Guam. So I spent the next several months, not quite a year, on Guam. We
arrived too late to be of any good to anybody, but it was the closest I came to the real
war. I was shipped back in February 1946, went back to my old job.
Q: Which old job was that?
Ferrone: At the iron ore mine. Now I was a bookkeeper. Then I went off to college,
Colorado College in 1947, in February 1947. I applied to Columbia, they turned me
down, and then I decided I would go to Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, which
would have meant living at home. But at the last minute, a WAC that I had met in the
army said she was going to Colorado College—and that’s where I’d met her, at Colorado
Springs—said why didn’t I go to Colorado College. I thought it was a great idea, so off I
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went. I spent two years there, but I wanted creative writing, and they didn’t offer it. I
applied to Harvard and Stanford, Harvard turned me down. Stanford accepted me.
Q: How did you know you wanted to do creative writing? What was in your mind at that
point?
Ferrone: I had done a lot of writing in my high school years.
Q: What kind?
Ferrone: Nonfiction. And had won a writing contest that my English teacher arranged.
She encouraged me to write. I just felt it.
Q: Had you at that point been speaking Italian at home, or no?
Ferrone: I spoke no Italian. My mother, as I said, translated between me and my father.
She spoke English with no accent. I think possibly, too, because of my father’s inability
to learn the language, language became more important to me. I was compensating for
him in some strange way. I also took courses in writing and English, correspondence
courses. When I was in the army on Guam, I was taking correspondence courses in
English.
Q: In prose writing or—
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Ferrone: Essay writing, I think. And my commanding officer even invited me to vet his
letters. There I was with a high school education, and another of my colleagues in the
army and I had to write reports based on the radio transmissions, the logs that men in our
detachment would transcribe. So we would prepare these pretentious reports on the
dangers of security lapses. I was doing a lot of writing of one sort or another.
So off I went to Stanford in fall of 1948 to major in creative writing. I began
writing stories there.
Q: Fiction?
Ferrone: Fiction. I had three stories published in the quarterly magazine put out at
Stanford called the Pacific Spectator, and I had one story published by a quarterly called
Epoch, which emanated from Cornell University. I studied with Wallace Stegner.
Q: Did you really?
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: Oh, my. That must have been the best possible education.
Ferrone: He was a wonderful man, and we became friends, really. I visited him
whenever I went to California after I graduated.
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Q: Was it obvious what a fine writer he was at that point?
Ferrone: Oh yes, and he was a help in getting me a creative writing fellowship.
Q: Where was this? At Stanford?
Ferrone: At Stanford, yes. There was a professor emeritus named Edith Miralees, who
was also quite interested in me and my writing, and she was editor of the Pacific
Spectator for a number of years. So on the strength of getting the creative writing
fellowship, I made my first trip to Europe in 1950, and that was the beginning of the trail
that led to Beard, really.
Q: How so?
Ferrone: Because a friend in California at Stanford said, “When you’re in Italy, Rome,
look up my friend Ted Hitchcock.” It was an elderly man who worked for the Rome
Daily American newspaper and who later appeared briefly in the film Roman Holiday.
When I moved to New York in 1953, Ted wrote and said, “Look up my friend
Paul Bernard,” a man who, I believe, was in advertising. Then when I moved to 12th
Street in 1954, Paul noted that I was living a few doors away from James Beard. He
says, “You two ought to get to know each other.” So that was the beginning of thirty
years of friendship and a professional relationship.
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Q: What did you do after you got back from that European trip?
Ferrone: I got my master’s degree in creative writing.
Q: At Stanford?
Ferrone: At Stanford. Then Stegner got me a job at the Stanford University Press, where
I was an apprentice editor, and I worked there for only about a year and a half.
When I came back to New York one Christmas holiday, a woman I know who
was at Stanford had moved to New York, and I spent the weekend here. New York
looked so glamorous and exciting, I decided it was time to come back east. So I packed
up, got a ride with a fellow student who was driving cross country, and arrived in New
York in March 1953.
Q: Any job prospects in mind?
Ferrone: Again, a whole chain of friends who were responsible for my getting my first
job. Again, a friend in California said look up a friend in New York who was in
publishing. I think he worked for Bobbs Merrill at that point, Bill Raney. Bill sent me to
Frank Taylor, who was then editor-in-chief of Dell Books. Dell Books were packaged by
an editorial staff working for Western Printing and Lithographing Company, but we
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acquired the books, did everything, and Dell was really the distributor and publisher.
They were mass-market books. When I arrived, they were still not quite respectable.
Q: Dell?
Ferrone: Mass-market books. But it was the beginning of a shift to trade paperbacks.
We began to produce classics with introductions by well-known academics, and I started
off as a reader and became an editor.
Q: After about how long?
Ferrone: Oh, after about a year, I would think.
Q: Now, in those days, editors really edited, right?
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: That’s so different now. So, once you had a book in hand, how did you approach
that?
Ferrone: Well, we were largely reprinters at that point, but we started up something
called first editions, which were original books. One of the more offbeat things that I
produced during that period was a collection of pieces by Noel Coward, short stories,
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plays, and lyrics. He’d just had his comeback triumph in Las Vegas. It was about 1952
or ‘53.
Q: Did you know him, or how did you get that assignment?
Ferrone: I think it was on the strength of his publicity in Las Vegas, I thought it would
make a sellable book, and I was indulged in it.
Q: You asked if you could approach him?
Ferrone: I just asked if we could do it, and he agreed to it, and when he was in New
York, I went to visit him at Hampton House. I wasn’t given credit for putting together
the anthology, but they needed a name. The name that we came up with at that point was
a writer for the New York Times, Gilbert Milstein. Means nothing nowadays, but he was
a feature writer at that point, and we both went to see Coward at Hampton House. And
there was one song, the lyrics to which I couldn’t—I couldn’t find the lyrics to one song,
and Coward dictated “Mad About the Boy” to me. Milstein was very fawning, and
Coward kept slapping him down. [laughs] He was very nice to me. But that’s just one
of numbers of original projects that began to crop up in the midst of these reprints.
Q: And the company let you do these original projects?
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Ferrone: Yes. We also put out the first guide to LP records, and for that I secured the
endorsement of Stokowski and went to visit him. I think he was then married to Gloria
Vanderbilt or had just ceased being married to her.
They were exciting years and entertaining years. Frank Taylor was a rather
charming, flamboyant character and entrepreneur. I don’t think he ever edited a thing,
but he had taste and an instinct for hiring the right people to work for him. I worked with
the Dell group for, I think, eleven years, until Western Printing and Dell split. Most of us
from the editorial staff were invited to go with Dell and continue. A number of us stayed
behind and set up a new publishing company, a new publishing imprint, which didn’t
really get off the ground.
Q: You were part of that group?
Ferrone: Part of that group, yes.
Q: And the idea was to publish what kind of things?
Ferrone: Just general trade publishing. That fell apart, and I stayed on for another
incarnation under Albert Leventhal, who used to run Golden Books. That fell apart, and I
was unemployed for about six months.
Q: This would have been when?
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Ferrone: 1964 or 1965. When I heard about the job opening up at Harcourt Brace, they
were looking for a paperback editor. They had had a paperback line for a number of
years, but it was done with a left hand by the editors. They had nobody in charge. So I
took over as editor of Harvest Books and was with Harcourt for twenty-six years,
eventually doing hardcover books as well as paperbacks.
Q: How did it develop that you began to work with the incredibly distinguished literary
writers that you worked with?
Ferrone: Well, first of all, I reprinted many of them.
Q: Reprinted. Who would that have been?
Ferrone: Well, Alice Walker for one, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Anais Nin.
Q: Reprinted them for the American paperback market?
Ferrone: Yes. Harvest Books was a trade paperback imprint. I also handled a line of
books that was done in conjunction with the college department. They were trade
paperbacks that were done by academics, but they weren’t textbooks. It was called
Harbinger Books. There was a third paperback line for, well, young readers, not
children, but teenage readers, called Harbrace Paperbound Library, which included the
more popular books, My Sister Eileen, and that sort of thing, Miracle on 34th Street.
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And then I got involved with the children’s books. They were called Voyager
Books. So I reprinted those and had to deal with children’s book authors, including the
infamous Pamela Travers of Mary Poppins fame. So I was handling five paperback
imprints plus an occasional hardcover book.
Q: And since they were some of them reprinted, did that mean that you could edit any of
them? How did that work?
Ferrone: No, they were just reprinted as they were. As I may have told you, I served as
the American editor for the Virginia Woolf books. First of all, no one in the trade
department seemed interested in Virginia Woolf besides me. I saw that all of the books
of hers that were out of print were brought back into print, and I was the American editor
for Quentin Bell’s biography of her, and it went on from there.
Q: This would have been about when?
Ferrone: In the early seventies. So I was American editor for the diaries and letters and
other Bloomsbury books. I was also editor of several posthumous collections of works
by C.S. Lewis, letters, stories.
Q: Now, how did it happen then that you began to work with Anais Nin and Alice
Walker and Eudora Welty? Which came first?
Ferrone– 1 - 13
Ferrone: I’m just trying to think of the order of things. Anais Nin, her editor at Harcourt
was originally a man named Hiram Haydn, a very distinguished editor who helped found
Atheneum. Hiram died. He was an elderly man. I’m just trying to think whether—I had
probably reprinted the first volume of Anais’s diary. She came to my office to see me.
That was 1969. So when Hiram died, I took over as her full-time editor.
Q: And what did that mean? Presumably they were published in Europe first, or were
they?
Ferrone: No.
Q: They were published here first?
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: I see. So then what role did you have in the actual books—volumes, rather?
Ferrone: Well, I was fully editing at that point.
Q: Could you describe to me what that meant?
Ferrone: Line editing, not merely acquisition. I was always a hands-on editor, which
worked with some authors and not with others. Alice Walker, for example, was a more
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prickly person to work with, although we got along, but I didn’t retreat. I felt I wasn’t
doing my authors any good if I was in awe of them. So Alice came to me in the same
way, through the death of her editor. She was originally published by Hiram Haydn also,
her first book of poetry. Hiram died, and she was handed over to a British editor—well,
he was working for Harcourt. Tony Godwin. Tony died of a heart attack, and Alice was
left high and dry at Harcourt, and her agent came to me and asked me to take over,
because Alice was pleased with the work I had done in reprinting her earlier volumes.
Eudora Welty was another. That was simply a case of my admiring her work, and
we had published most of her short stories.
Q: What was she like? To work with, that is.
Ferrone: Wonderful, humble, modest, cooperative.
Q: Rare.
Ferrone: It took a while to get all the rights assembled so I could do the collected stories.
But the collected stories brought her enormous acclaim, won the National Book Award
and really launched her in a way that she hadn’t been before. And we became very good
friends. Over a period of ten years, she used to visit me at my farm in Pennsylvania for
weekends.
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Q: Now, with people of this stature, what kind of a role did you have in actually shaping
any of the words or presentation?
Ferrone: With the collected stories, I would have no shaping to do. It was largely
administrative work. But in the case of Alice Walker and Nin, yes, there was raw
material worked on.
Q: How raw?
Ferrone: Well, both finished, accomplished writers, so when I say raw, a bit of editing
here and there.
Q: And, meanwhile, what was your life in New York like? Were you enjoying New
York?
Ferrone: Tremendously. The fifties were great. Sixties were very unsettling, weren’t
they? I can’t see it in decades really beyond that. It just flows.
Q: What did you have time to do yourself? I mean, presumably you got to know a lot of
people. What kind of a personal life were you leading?
Ferrone: It was very exciting, because I had so many people who were enriching my life.
There was Beard in the food world and other food people. I worked with Walter Terry on
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a guide to the ballet, so he would haul me off to the ballet frequently. And there was
Emily Coleman, who was a music and dance critic for Newsweek magazine, and I got
taken off to the opera and concerts. Who else?
Q: Where were you living? What kind of apartment situation did you have?
Ferrone: I started off on 12th Street in a tiny studio apartment, third-floor walk-up. I had
three sticks of furniture. I was poor. Then I moved to a one-bedroom apartment on 8th
Street, where I was quite happy for a number of years until 8th Street began to deteriorate.
And then a friend of Beard’s, Agnes White, an interior designer, found this apartment for
me.
Q: This one?
Ferrone: This one.
Q: Wow.
Ferrone: That was about 1965.
Q: So you would have been how old, approximately, then?
Ferrone: About forty-four.
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Q: It’s a great apartment.
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: How did she find it?
Ferrone: She had a real estate agency which her husband used to run, William Alfred
White. He died and she inherited it. She was a close Portland friend of Beard’s. She
knew him from Oregon days.
Q: Before you met Beard, were you interested in food at all?
Ferrone: Yes. I was a decent cook with a very limited repertoire. I made an awful lot of
chicken cacciatore in those days. I had a few dishes, but I did pretty well.
Q: Was it like your mother’s cooking?
Ferrone: Well, not really. I don’t know how I picked it up. There was a time at
Colorado College when I batched with three Jewish guys. We took turns cooking. None
of us knew how to cook, really, and they were all music students. They had an apartment
with a woman named Carol Truaz, who was a fine cook and had produced a book called
the Sixty-Minute Chef. So we learned from that. That was my first cookbook.
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Q: And you just continued when you got to New York, or how did that work?
Ferrone: Yes. Well, when I met Beard, I began to pick up things immediately. He was
my mentor, of course.
Q: How did you meet him?
Ferrone: Well, as I said earlier, when I moved to 12th Street after my being in New York
about six months, a mutual friend noted the fact that Jim and I lived only a few doors
apart from each other, and he thought we should get to know each other, and gave Jim
my telephone number and me Jim’s number. I don’t know who called whom first.
Q: What was he like at that point?
Ferrone: Always, always good company, charming, generous, interested in everything,
not only food, but music, books, politics, gossip.
Q: I noticed in the list of articles that you gave me and the list of meals, that the meals
preceded the articles by about ten years, so I wasn’t sure what that meant, whether—
Ferrone: The meals preceded the articles.
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Q: You started having meals about ten years before you started helping him with his
articles.
Ferrone: That was because he was working with a friend named Isabel Callvert for the
beginning years. She was a Portlander, a radio actress from Jim’s early days there, and
she worked with him on three of his cookbooks, early cookbooks and articles.
So I didn’t kick in until The James Beard Cookbook, which was published in
1959, and that came about—I’d known Jim for about a year. Well, I told my boss, Frank
Taylor, that Jim was available for a cookbook. He’d had four cookbooks published at
that point, and my boss was interested in this news. So the question was what kind of a
cookbook would he write. There’s always been some question about how he came to ask
him to write a basic cookbook. I seem to remember it was Frank’s wife, Nan Taylor,
who was a good cook, who said that we really hadn’t had a good basic cookbook since
Fannie Farmer, and that’s what Jim should do. So that’s how the basic idea came along.
Frank invited Jim and me along with his wife, Nan, to Chambord to present this
proposal. Chambord was then the upscale French restaurant in New York in those days.
And Jim accepted the proposal. I remember the meal was sumptuous. For four of us it
cost $110, which was astronomical.
Q: And this was what year?
Ferrone: 1955, I would say.
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Q: So about that time, who were you editing in a literary way? Certainly you had a full
plate.
Ferrone: At that time, I was largely reprinting. We were doing reprints of the classics
and working with academics on introductions. I worked with a long list of academics.
Q: I guess what I’m getting at is how was publishing a cookbook, even with James
Beard, seen in the publishing world?
Ferrone: It was very unusual, because it was an original cookbook in paperback.
Normally it would have been published in hardcover first and then reprinted.
Q: And why was it in paperback first?
Ferrone: Because we had this [unclear] line of first editions. We were creating new
books. The book actually was reprinted in hardcover later, so it reversed the usual
process, but it was a huge success. He did it in collaboration with Isabel Callvert. It got
some publicity from Craig Claiborne in the New York Times just before it appeared, and
the book was sold out in all the bookstores and newsstands in New York and even on the
Dell’s list. It even outsold his number one fiction book, Anatomy of a Murder. In his
first year of publication, it sold 150,000 copies.
Q: Oh, my heavens. And that would have been—
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Ferrone: 1959.
Q: Wow. A hundred and fifty thousand copies was huge then.
Ferrone: A mass-market distribution was in those numbers. And next month we
celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. It’s been continuously in print all these years.
Q: As a paperback?
Ferrone: No, his hardcover editions and paperback.
Q: Now, he had worked with Isabelle on that, but then as time went on, did you take over
as the editor for that?
Ferrone: That was the beginning of my editorial involvement with him.
Q: Could you tell me about that?
Ferrone: When it came time to find an editor for his Delights and Prejudices, his agent
turned to me. That would have been about 1962. And I was handed a manuscript, I may
have told you, on onionskin, single spaced, totally unorganized, just a clump of patches
of writing. So I had to organize it into chapters and suggest places where it could be
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filled out, suggested new chapters. Jim and the agent were so pleased with the results
that I really got the job of working with him on articles.
Q: Tell me what you mean by that, the job of working with him on articles.
Ferrone: Well, he was writing for House and Garden, Woman’s Day, Gourmet, although
for Gourmet for a short time only, and he, in those days, used to type out his material.
The notion that he had a ghost writer was certainly inaccurate. This really was raw
material. He would bang out his article, had no interest in shaping it further or polishing
it, he was done with it, and he needed someone to polish it and organize it properly.
Q: Why do you think he had no interest in doing that?
Ferrone: He didn’t consider himself to be a good writer. He just wasn’t interested in
himself as a writer, though the material was all there, the authority, the charm, the energy,
the creativity, but he just didn’t want to look at it again after he’d pounded it out.
Q: So what would happen?
Ferrone: That’s where I came in. I enjoyed polishing, rewriting. So I would have a fulltime job. I’d come home in the evenings and do food work.
Q: What were you doing in your full-time job at that point?
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Ferrone: At which point?
Q: When you would come home and work on his articles.
Ferrone: Well, I was working on all the things I’ve discussed.
Q: What years are we talking about, the years of those first articles?
Ferrone: It would have been from the sixties and seventies.
Q: By that time, what was your friendship like? Was it close, was it—
Ferrone: It was very close.
Q: Sometimes it can be hard to try and edit material from somebody who is a close
friend. Did he have any, I don’t know, pride of ownership in the words or anything like
that?
Ferrone: No. I never got any feedback after I would turn in a completed article. He
would never say, “That’s fine. That’s just what I wanted. That sounds like me.”
Nothing. He was done with it. I had the feeling that he felt a little bit abashed, the fact
that it really wasn’t completely his own work.
Ferrone– 1 - 24
Q: What gave you that feeling?
Ferrone: I was just trying to interpret his silence. [laughter]
Q: Were you spending a lot of time together at that point?
Ferrone: Well, we’d always lived close by, because he lived, first of all, on 10th Street,
and I lived on 8th Street and then here, and he moved from 10th to 12th, so he was just
around the corner. I would pop in to see him. I should mention the time, too, when he
was living on 8th Street, I stopped in to see him after work one day, and he was having a
heart attack. And at that point, his companion, Gino Cofacci, was in residence, but he
didn’t want to bother Gino.
So I rushed to the phone, called his doctor, and said, “Get an ambulance and get
him to Doctors’ Hospital.” So the ambulance came. They wanted to be paid in advance
for the trip, so this poor man, who’s having a heart attack, had to sign a blank check. I
rode in the ambulance with him to Doctors’ Hospital, and we got into a traffic jam near
Gracie Mansion. I thought Jim wasn’t going to make it, but finally they got him
installed, and he survived very nicely. And the period following when he was
recuperating was a real circus in his hospital room. There were balloons.
Q: That really was a circus. [laughs]
Ferrone– 1 - 25
Ferrone: Restaurant Associates sent him splits of champagne and lump crabmeat all
packed in ice for visitors. All his friends would sneak in food for him. Alvin Kerr, who
worked for Gourmet magazine, would bring him in hamburgers. I would stop at the
Swedish delicatessen on Second Avenue and bring him sandwiches and Swedish
meatballs. Rudolph Stanish, the omelet king, prepared an omelet at bedside.
Q: How long was he there?
Ferrone: He must have been there for several weeks.
Q: Did he ever talk about his food consumption, worried about it, or anything like that?
Ferrone: Oh, he was always dieting and falling off the diet.
Q: Do you know if he felt ashamed of not being able to stay on a diet, which, of course,
is everybody.
Ferrone: He felt guilty about it, yes. I imagine he would sneak food, I would guess.
Q: Let’s talk a little bit about the meals at his home that you were part of. How would
something like that happen? Would it be spontaneous? Would he invite people? How
would it work?
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Ferrone: Well, I was there frequently as the only guest. It might be an impromptu call
the same day or the day before. In the early days before his companion, Gino Cofacci, I
might be the only guest because he was doing a lot of kitchen testing in those days. He
was working on magazine articles, and it was exciting because it was experimental. I
would be learning in the process, and very often he would give me plates of food to carry
home, sometimes enough so I could invite a friend to share it with me the next day.
When Gino entered the picture, it was somewhat different. When he lived on 12th
Street, for example, Gino had a third-floor apartment. I would go over, and Jim would be
in the kitchen. We would start putting dinner together, the two of us. It was wonderful,
easy. We’d laugh and chat. And Jim had this way of going about putting together a meal
with great ease. He knew exactly what he was doing. He’d be whistling or humming.
When he got to this point where the meal was just about ready, he would get on
the telephone and call Cofacci on the third floor and say, “We’re ready now.” Cofacci
would enter, and the whole atmosphere would change to one of fussing, anxiety,
complaints.
Q: From whom?
Ferrone: From Cofacci.
Q: And how did Beard react to that?
Ferrone: Tolerated it. But the magic was gone. The fun was gone.
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Q: Of making the meal?
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: The list that you gave me had such amazing details of so many of the meals. I
wondered if you’d kept notes, or how you kept a record of that?
Ferrone: It was not intentional. It came from various sources. I did keep little datebooks
at that point. I may have just jotted down a particular meal. But I don’t know what other
sources I had. This probably would be my only source.
Q: That’s amazing. I guess you kept all your datebooks.
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: In the article that you gave me with the trip in the south of France, it seemed as
though he might have been writing letters to you before you got over there?
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: Is that correct?
Ferrone– 1 - 28
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: So the information about the food might have come from those letters? In other
words, the information about the meals where you were not present.
Ferrone: Some of it may have come from letters he wrote to Helen Evans Brown, in
which he talked about what he was planning to cook or what he had cooked, for himself
or for me.
Q: How much was food a subject of his conversation?
Ferrone: He was always interested in what you just ate or were about to eat. If you were
to ask me what food people talked about, I would say food. They’re always chatting
about food, but Beard was interested in everything, as I said.
Q: Did you ever do other things with him, go places with him, you know, to the theater
or opera or anything like that?
Ferrone: I’ve been to the opera with him.
Q: Did he enjoy opera?
Ferrone: Oh, he was a great opera fan.
Ferrone– 1 - 29
Q: Because of his early interest in it?
Ferrone: Yes. Well, he studied voice. I spent three vacations with him, I may have told
you.
Q: No.
Ferrone: Twice with him in Plascassier in Julia Child’s house, and once in Gearhart, in
Oregon seaside, where he used to go in summers as a boy with his family. He was
staying in a friend’s house, Harvey Welsh’s house, and I was there with him and his
childhood friend, Mary Hamblett. I remember going clamming, razor clamming, with a
little shovel, bringing back the clams, which Jim cooked for us for our lunch. And I
visited him in San Francisco when he held cooking classes at Stanford Court Hotel.
Q: When you went on vacations with him, did he ever bring along any of his
companions?
Ferrone: No. Well, on two of these occasions I was working on a book with him. In St.
Remy, for example, we were finishing up Delights and Prejudices, and at Plascassier we
were working on American Cookery. We worked on American Cookery for almost four
years. I thought it would never end.
Ferrone– 1 - 30
Q: Why did it take that long?
Ferrone: It’s a huge book. It was intended to be comprehensive. He had a lot to say.
He’d done a tremendous amount of research. Even then, there are holes in it. We just
finally couldn’t go on any longer. [laughs]
Q: What kinds of holes?
Ferrone: It seems to me that we couldn’t get it [unclear] the chapter on preserving and
canning. I’d have to go look at it again.
Q: Actually, let us go over the books that you did edit. Soups, is that correct?
Ferrone: No.
Q: No? Because I read that you edited Soups.
Ferrone: I did a little series for Thames and Hudson, Soups, Salads, Shellfish, and
Poultry. That was posthumous.
Q: All of them?
Ferrone: Those four, yes.
Ferrone– 1 - 31
Q: So the ones that you worked on with him when he was alive were?
Ferrone: Starting off with James Beard Cookbook, Delights and Prejudices, Menus for
Entertaining, Beard on Bread.
Q: And then on your own afterward you did The Armchair James Beard?
Ferrone: I did the book of letters, Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles and The
Armchair James Beard.
Q: So when you were working with him on either the Cookbook or Delights and
Prejudices, was there a standard pattern of behavior? How did that work? Would he
present you with more onionskin?
Ferrone: No. For the earlier books, he would type out the material, but for the later ones,
for, say, Beard on Bread and the books beyond that, he would tape the material, and his
secretary would transcribe it and we’d get the rough draft.
Q: Why did he tape it, do you think?
Ferrone: His fingers wouldn’t fit on the typewriter keys any longer.
Ferrone– 1 - 32
Q: I see. That’s a good reason. And in terms of the writing procedure on the many,
many articles that you did with him over the years, how did that work? He would give
you—
Ferrone: Again, it would probably be taped and then transcribed, where the earlier ones
would have been typed up by him.
Q: So when were the years where you would have done that at night, rather than on your
day job?
Ferrone: I would say during the sixties and seventies.
Q: Did you have an arrangement, an unspoken arrangement? Did he pay you? Did you
do it as a favor?
Ferrone: It was handled through his agent.
Q: Aha. So it was treated in a professional manner.
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: And when you would finish an article, would it go back to him? Would it go straight
to House and Garden? How would that work?
Ferrone– 1 - 33
Ferrone: It would go back to him.
Q: Did you mind not getting more credit for it at that point?
Ferrone: No.
Q: Tell me about that.
Ferrone: I didn’t feel the need for credit somehow. I felt bad for him in a way. I’m sorry
that he couldn’t complete the process himself. He did well by me, after all.
Q: No? Did he also leave you physically any of his material?
Ferrone: No. I acquired some things from the estate that were auctioned off. That
Chinese painting, “The Ancestors,” was Jim’s, for example.
Q: And you purchased that from the estate?
Ferrone: Yes, at the auction. He was great on giving me castoff kitchen things, and in
the early days, too, he used to travel by ship to Europe, and he would buy enormous
quantities of dishes. He would bring back a barrel full. He’d give me nine wonderful
dishes from France.
Ferrone– 1 - 34
One time he was having his shirts custom-made in Barcelona. He noted that one
of the workmen had a wonderful striped apron. It was more than an apron; it was more
like a smock. He had one made for me and one made for Craig Claiborne.
Q: Do you still have it?
Ferrone: I never wore it. I don’t think I ever saw on occasion to use it. I think I gave it
away.
Q: Oh, my.
Ferrone: Jim was very generous to begin with, which seems at odds with his reputation
for being very tight, especially when going to restaurants with friends and not footing the
bill.
Q: Did that always happen?
Ferrone: Well, I used to eat out a lot with him in restaurants, but usually it was on the
house.
Q: So how did that reputation get going for not picking up the tab?
Ferrone– 1 - 35
Ferrone: Well, it occurs in his biographies. I wasn’t aware of it myself. He was always
afraid of going broke.
Q: Why do you think that was?
Ferrone: Well, he was freelancing. He was scrambling. He had a rather elaborate
lifestyle. He entertained lavishly, traveled, and he had to really hustle to bring it all
together.
Q: What do you mean?
Ferrone: He had to have so many sources of income, and he was writing cookbooks and
writing articles and doing food demonstrations across the country, appearing on
television, acting as a consultant to restaurants, acting as consultant to Green Giant, doing
demonstrations for the Cognac people.
Q: I know it’s a different time now, but was any of that frowned upon?
Ferrone: Well, he was always criticized for being tight and anti-commercial, but I never
saw that it affected his writing. I mean, he could do consulting for Green Giant, for
example, but that didn’t mean that he was going to push Green Giant products in his
cookbooks.
Ferrone– 1 - 36
Q: He was criticized because at that time nobody was doing it?
Ferrone: Nobody was doing it and certainly not to his extent to which he was doing it.
He had his fingers in an awful lot of pies.
Q: Why do you think he was so anxious about going broke?
Ferrone: Well, I could understand that if you don’t have a full-time job.
Q: Did he ever talk about his mother and how his mother managed to support herself or
if that was difficult?
Ferrone: Well, he wrote about it extensively in Delights and Prejudices.
Q: But as conversation?
Ferrone: He didn’t talk much about his mother.
Q: Do you think that you learned anything from him about food, and I don’t mean
recipes. I mean starting with good product, that kind of thing?
Ferrone– 1 - 37
Ferrone: I learned everything from him about it, how to cook honestly, simply, with
attention to the freshness of the food. He gave me a sense of the joy of cooking
seasonally. We used to have an asparagus festival every spring.
Q: What was that like?
Ferrone: Either he would do it or I would do it. We’d have the first asparagus on the
market and shad roe. And he also taught me the importance of food presentation, a
sensuous approach to food, rather than just a clinical approach.
Q: How was that communicated to you? I mean the importance of food presentation.
Ferrone: I imitated him. He was not one for serving sets of dishes.
Q: You mean to have all the food come on the same kind of plate?
Ferrone: Yes, a parade of a dinner service. He collected wonderful Majolica and all sorts
of other dinnerware, antiques often, and he would choose the dish to suit the food. And
so it wasn’t boring. It was exciting. I think we all imitated him whether we were going
out for a meal [unclear]. H was a pacesetter.
Q: Tell me what you mean.
Ferrone– 1 - 38
Ferrone: He was always on the lookout for new foods, and he’d go traveling, and he’d
bring back a new dish and it would become his new signature dish for the season. We’d
all copy it.
Q: He seems to have had tumultuous personal relationships with all different kinds of
people, professional people, friends. But your relationship didn’t seem to have that.
Ferrone: No. The only time he got mad at me was when we were doing a new edition of
his book Fowl and Gamebird Cookery. I think the original was Fowl and Game, and we
changed it to Fowl and Gamebird. I didn’t want a conventional food cover. I wanted a
picture of Jim on the cover with birds, and the artist couldn’t quite get Jim right. Jim was
on the West Coast, and finally the artist came up with a cover which seemed acceptable.
But I couldn’t get in touch with Jim, and we were down to a deadline. We finally had to
go into production. And Jim hated that cover so much because it had a pheasant flying
behind his head, but it looked as though he was wearing a feathered hat. And he got
furious with me over that jacket. That’s the only time I remember him being angry with
me. But I don’t recall his having tumultuous relationships with other people in the food
world.
Q: No, I wasn’t really thinking of the food world. Well, he just seemed to—maybe
“tumultuous” is not quite the right word. There were moments of intense emotion in one
way or another.
Ferrone– 1 - 39
Ferrone: Can you think of somebody you have in mind?
Q: Well, I guess I was thinking more of personal relationships, rather. I mean, you
would never—or perhaps you would—have described him as a person of extremely even
temperament, would you?
Ferrone: He had a temper, certainly, which I’ve only seen operating once or twice.
Q: The other day—and we’ve talked about it tangentially today—you talked about him
and the performance of food, meal as a performance. I wondered if you could amplify on
that a little bit.
Ferrone: Well, you know, several people have said that he was a poor television
performer and was self-conscious in front of the camera. That may have been true, but I
think of all the enormous numbers of food demonstrations he did across the country for
his cooking school and on behalf of Cognac industry. He, I think, was quite at ease in
front of a smaller live audience. With the Cognac performance, there were always
flames, of course, so it was very theatrical.
Q: Did that extend into meals at his house?
Ferrone: Well, I don’t recall flaming at his house. He used to have his cocktail buffets
with a great crush of people, but he never had these tiny, precious canapés, which he
Ferrone– 1 - 40
called doots. He had a spectacular roast of beef with someone to carve it, and French
bread. He would have Polish sausages poached in red wine and sliced. At one point, he
was serving baby quail. But the food was—“generous” is a weak word for it.
Q: Let me ask you about the books that he either worked on with other people or that
other people more or less wrote most of them. How did that happen?
Ferrone: Well, I think I was succeeded by José Wilson, who used to be food editor at
House and Garden. She also did a syndicated column with him. And then José
committed suicide, and then he worked briefly with Irene Sax.
Q: But she told me that she did write one book for him.
Ferrone: She wrote it for him?
Q: Yes.
Ferrone: I wasn’t aware that he ever—sure, he dictated the material.
Q: I’ll find out and let you know.
Ferrone: Because that would have been his style at that point, talking into a machine. It
would have been the New James Beard maybe? The New James Beard was a
Ferrone– 1 - 41
compilation of all the recipes he really wanted to preserve. Or was it Beard on Pasta? I
don’t know. It’s possible it was Beard on Pasta.
Q: Why did you actually stop working with him on books? I mean, you seem to have
continued on articles. When you say that you were succeeded by José Wilson, what
stopped? I mean, why was she necessary? Why did you stop?
Ferrone: Well, Beard just switched allegiances, I guess.
Q: In terms of the books?
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: Do you have any idea why?
Ferrone: I can’t think why.
Q: With any discussion with you or—
Ferrone: I don’t recall a discussion. Jim wouldn’t have discussed anything like this. I’m
just trying to think whether I had too much work to do and couldn’t handle it anymore. I
really can’t remember. Or it may have been that José lost her job at House and Garden
and—
Ferrone– 1 - 42
Q: During the time, which is decades, that you were working with him, were you
continuing to work as an editor on all the things that you’ve previously edited, literary
things?
Ferrone: Yes.
Q: So what kinds of day jobs were you engaged in at that point? What kinds of authors?
Ferrone: Well, apart from those major authors that I listed?
Q: Yes.
Ferrone: It’s hard to remember, there was so much. I was editor for a book by Janet
Flanner, for example, called Janet Flanner’s World. She was then somewhat senile. I
went to visit her.
Q: And she lived in Paris?
Ferrone: She lived in New York. And I went to her eighty-fifth birthday party, which
was quite an event, with people like Virgil Thompson and Glenway Wescott and Ned
Rorem in attendance.
Ferrone– 1 - 43
Q: Wow.
Ferrone: We gave a big party for the book at the St. Regis, and I was editing C.S. Lewis’
books, in conjunction with his executor in England.
Q: Was Beard interested in that side of your work at all?
Ferrone: Just trying to think whether—I don’t think he would have been interested in
Virginia Woolf or Anais Nin or Alice Walker, but he read a lot, certainly.
Q: Do you know what kinds of things?
Ferrone: I don’t know. Whatever was current, I would say.
Q: I’m going to turn this off.
[End of interview]