There's a scene in the movie The Big Chill where Jeff Goldblum's character announces that he's going to open a club in New York. "Like Elaine's," he says. "But hipper. Elaine's is dead."
At the time of the movie's release, in 1983, this assessment wasn't far from the truth. When I went on board as a bartender a few years later, the fabled Upper East Side establishment barely had a pulse. For 20 years—from the days of Dorothy Kilgallen and Earl Wilson bylines in the early '60s through the early '80s, when it appeared on the cover of New York magazine—the restaurant had been a gossip-column staple. But night after night I stood behind an empty bar. And night after night owner Elaine Kaufman sat alone at Table 4—a decade earlier an Algonquin-style gathering place for writers and artists from all over. She watched the door like a faithful collie waiting for its master to come home. But the door rarely opened. And every night at two or three in the morning, one of the waiters would fetch her shawl from the back room, and Elaine would turn to me and shrug, offering any number of excuses: It was too hot or too cold. It was tax season or the Jewish holidays. "Tomorrow will be better," she'd say as she passed me on her way out the door.
Those years in the desert weren't particularly good for my wallet, but they did afford me a chance to get to know the woman behind what was once—and is again today—among the hottest restaurants this country has ever known.
And did she have stories. There was the one about the night in 1964 when Jackie Kennedy came knocking at the door well past closing time. Elaine had been sitting around swapping tales with Frank Conroy, Nelson Aldrich, and Jack Richardson when the bartender called over to tell her Mrs. Kennedy was outside. Elaine laughed, thinking he was joking, but then she looked over and saw Jackie, "dressed in a gold Chanel suit with a starburst brooch," waiting on the sidewalk with Leonard Bernstein, Susan Sontag, Adolph Green, Betty Comden, and George Plimpton, among others. "I think it was her first night out after mourning," Elaine told me. "She put some money in the jukebox and the bunch of them danced for hours."
Then there was the time Imelda Marcos showed up with a squadron of armed guards. (Sharpshooters, Elaine said, were positioned on the roof.) And the night Rudolf Nureyev arrived directly from the airport, having just touched down in the United States.
Remarkably, Elaine recounted all of this stuff without a trace of melancholy. Not for a single moment—even as those dead months stretched into years—did she consider that her time at the top might be over. She always believed she'd be back.
The word on the street in those days was that the food was to blame. While early reviews had been mostly favorable (James Beard had written that the fare at Elaine's was "good and wholesome"), as the years passed, critics began calling it mediocre at best, dreadful at worst. And each time another scathing evaluation came out, Elaine would descend into a dark funk. But anybody will tell you that Elaine's has never been about the food. It's the energy of the place—and the outsize personality of its proprietor—that draw the crowds.
There's no denying that Elaine Kaufman is a force to be reckoned with. She's a large woman with an encyclopedic mind that jumps from one subject to another and a temperament not well suited to suffering fools. Her conversational style tends toward jumbled non sequiturs, yet she gets annoyed with anybody who fails to keep up. I remember one night when Elaine started telling me something about Argentina. At first I thought she was talking about a new wine she'd added to the list. But then she mentioned something about the Nazis, and I knew she'd lost me. I looked to a waiter for help, but he just shrugged and slunk away. It turned out Elaine was talking about the famous Nazi hunter Peter Malkin, who'd been in the restaurant the night before. "Don't you read?" she demanded angrily before stomping off.
And lowly bartenders weren't her only targets. Though she's developed a reputation for kowtowing to the rich and famous, Elaine takes great pleasure in skewering inflated egos. I once heard her tell television star Chris Noth that he wouldn't know a real actor if he fell over one. When an aging movie starlet ordered a salad and a glass of water for dinner one night, explaining that she had to keep an eye on her figure, Elaine shot back, "You're the only one who does."
But the best story was the one about Norman Mailer. He'd come into the restaurant with a very young date who, Elaine said, was "on a power trip" because of the company she was keeping. At first the girl expressed displeasure about the table the couple had been given. Then she began to grouse about the service. Finally she called Elaine over to complain about the food. Now Elaine lets a lot of things roll off her back. (I once heard her shrug off a drunken woman who'd called her "a fat pig" with the retort, "Oh, that takes imagination.") But she will not stand for criticism of her food. "Listen, sweetheart," she said, looking at the young woman but cocking her head toward Mailer. "Him I have to take it from, but no half-a-hooker is going to tell me what to do." The writer stormed out in a huff, date in tow, and the following day Elaine received an angry handwritten letter from him. After reading the first few lines, she took a black magic marker and scrawled "BORING, BORING, BORING" in large block letters across every page. Then she sent the letter back.
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