Elaine Kaufman was born on the Upper West Side and grew up in Jamaica, Queens, where her father, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, ran a dry-goods store. In grammar school, Elaine says, instead of paying attention to her teachers, she would read the Daily News, which she used to keep hidden under her desk. She started working when she was 14, taking a job in a collectible stamps and magazines store in the theater district, and discovered immediately that she was a natural when it came to sales. When a customer asked to see a stamp, Elaine would place it on the back of her hand and display it as if it were a full-carat diamond.
A few years after graduating from high school, she started waitressing at a small place up in East Harlem. "That's where I learned the business," she says. It was also where she learned that she and the business were a perfect fit. "I said, 'Wow, here's an easy way to make money.'"
In 1961, Elaine took a waitressing job at Portofino, on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village. At the time, Bob Dylan was playing the coffeehouses, the Beat movement was in full vogue, and the Village was a vibrant place to be. It wasn't long before Elaine's quick wit and ribald language had earned her a reputation as something of a local character. After a few years, though—and a devastating romance with the restaurant's chef and owner—she decided it was time to move on. She set out in search of a place of her own and eventually found one in the far reaches of the Upper East Side, in what was known as Yorkville, then among the bluest of blue-collar neighborhoods. Everyone told her she was crazy to move so far from the action. (Years later, when Elaine's began to get attention, New York columnist Rex Reed wrote that he couldn't understand how anyone could afford the cab ride that far uptown.) But the place was clean and the price was right. And in April of 1963, Elaine opened her doors for business.
Almost from the start, she proved the naysayers wrong. Elaine's developed a solid base of regulars who didn't mind splurging to get to what so many considered the edge of the universe. Part of the allure was that having enough money to pay the check was never a problem at Elaine's. Stories of the way she'd carry tabs for those early customers are legendary. "I could go to Elaine's and spend like a rich Arab," recalled the playwright Larry L. King, "even though my telephone had been cut off back home."
The first time Elaine met the writer Hunter S. Thompson, then little known, he asked if he could cash a hundred-dollar check, using the writer Warren Hinckle, who'd accumulated quite a tab himself, as a reference. "If you're a friend of Warren's," Elaine told him, "that's good enough for me."
Running tabs for patrons with suspect means of support—and cashing checks that tended toward the elastic—may not have seemed like the best way to build a business, but Elaine apparently knew what she was doing. Within a few years, most of her "dependents" were well on their way to bright writing careers. Tabs were paid, and Elaine's became known as the city's quintessential literary salon.
As the '70s approached, though, the crowd began to change. In a story that ran in New York magazine, A. E. Hotchner described the restaurant's young stable of writers as "pilot fish…that, true to their name, lead other fish into their waters, namely sharks and barracudas."
In other words, Hollywood showed up. And with the movie stars, producers, and directors came an avalanche of celebrity-fueled press. Once known only among an intimate circle, Elaine's became one of the hottest restaurants in the world. It turned up in more than a dozen movies. The beginning of Woody Allen's landmark film Manhattan includes a shot of the restaurant's front window filling the screen. (It was during these years that Allen made Elaine's his home, eating there three, four, even five times a week.) Faye Dunaway and William Holden have dinner together at Elaine's in Sidney Lumet's Network; Richard Benjamin does a scene there in Diary of a Mad Housewife; and Elaine's appears in scenes in Author! Author!, The Odd Couple, and several others. (Elaine herself had a bit part in William Friedkin's 1970 film, The Boys in the Band.)
Hollywood romance also blossomed at Elaine's. In the late '60s, Judy Garland hung out at a back table with her young accompanist and music composer, Peter Allen, and her daughter Liza, who'd recently met in London. Some years later, Mia Farrow was introduced to Woody Allen there. Even Elaine found a husband—an Englishman who worked as a sommelier at the Helmsley Hotel. (The marriage lasted only a few months and ended in a bitter divorce. Decades later, when somebody came in to notify Elaine of her ex-husband's passing, she told me to fetch a bottle of Cristal Champagne and pour glasses all around.)
By the late 1970s, the restaurant's popularity had begun to take its toll. The press continued to trash the food, and increasingly Elaine herself became the target of their barbs. A picture of her threatening one of the paparazzi with a garbage-can lid appeared in newspapers across the country, and one of the Manhattan dailies included her on a list of "dragon ladies" of the city. She earned a reputation for catering to the rich and famous and leaving the common folk standing around while empty tables along "the line," the restaurant's most prestigious area, lay in wait for the in crowd. Eventually she expanded the place, building a back room, which was quickly dubbed Siberia, and further cementing her reputation as a snob. "It wasn't easy," Elaine says of those days. "They lined up to take shots at me."
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