Farewell to the One and Only Insatiable Critic

Gael Greene's incredible chutzpah

I feel like a lucky guy because I’m living this crazy dream where I get to write regularly for two of the publications I dreamed of writing for, GQ and New York. With the latter, not only do I write for it, I mostly write about food for Grub Street, which means I can claim a little tiny connection to a great lineage of writers including Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder as the Underground Gourmets, Mimi Sheraton, Adam Platt and, of course, Gael Greene, who passed away yesterday at the age of 88.

Usually, when saying somebody died recently, I’d add a “sadly” in there, but as a fan of Greene’s life and work, I feel I’d be doing her an injustice by dwelling on the fact that she’s no longer here and not celebrating the fact that she lived a damn life.

When I was a kid, I found a small stack of old copies of New York from the 1970s in my local library that they were getting ready to throw out. Before they could, I tossed them in my backpack and spent the next few days looking through the mags with their yellowed pages. The first one was an issue from 1974 with a cover story that looked at the evolution of the mafia in New York, Nora Ephron on divorce, and a bunch of other articles and ads that made me think that I was a teen in 1996 stuck in the Midwest when really what I should have been was some New Yorker reading New York in 1974. There was all this stuff contained within that one magazine that was nearly 20 years old then that became liturgy to me, but one thing stood out. It was this article by “The Insatiable Critic/Gael Greene” titled “More Confessions of a Sensualist.” I was 16 and had seen an episode or two of Red Shoe Diaries and was living in the middle of a really good time for erotic thrillers. I was intrigued and in my horny teenage mind I thought, “ This is going to be sexy stuff!” What did I get?

“Innocence gets bruised. Integrity gets tarnished. The critic walks on quicksand. The ego’s ooze grabs at the critic’s clay feet. She falls in love with her victims. She begins to study her smile and snarl in the mirror; she admires her bite.”

What the hell was I reading? Was this…about food? Something about some guy named Paul Bocuse hosting a dinner for women? A dinner that included Julia Child, Lillian Hellman, Gloria Steinem, Queen Elizabeth and … Gael Greene. A food critic having a lavish dinner with the Queen? What sort of a world was this? Was this real or fiction? I knew a little bit about new journalism, I’d read Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion by then, I sort of understood the idea that they were maybe bending some truth here and there and knew New York was one of the magazines that truly championed that sort of writing. I had no idea what I was reading, but holy shit, it was wild.

Little did I know, that was just Gael Greene. Eventually, thanks to the internet, I’d be able to discover more of her articles. I bought a copy of her memoir, Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess days after it was released. In it, she writes of her tryst with Elvis. The New York Times review of the book focused on that particular part because it was impossible not to:

She was wearing a "body-skimming black shantung dress," patent-leather pumps and "little white kid gloves." At their interview, Elvis led her, "still gloved," to his bed. "I think it was good," she writes. "I don't remember the essential details. It was certainly good enough." What she remembered most strongly was that afterward he asked her to call room service and order him a fried-egg sandwich. "At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn't know it yet."

And then, after I thought I’d read everything I needed to read to understand Greene and her insatiable appetite, I picked up an old paperback copy of her 1976 romance novel Blue Skies, No Candy. Here’s what the Times said about that book when it came out:

Gael Greene, who writes about food for New York magazine, now writes about sex for the readers of Cosmopolitan. It will take sex a while to recover.

and

Mostly, though, observation is at a minimum, and a craven craving for status reeks through the pages. Following this year's fashion, real people are mentioned en passant, thousands of them, in tones of unearned intimacy. It's a slender line that separates the tacky from the gross, and Miss Greene has crossed it.

First, I should mention that my nana had a copy of this book. Second, hell yes Gael Greene crossed that line. In a pull quote on the back of my copy, the Toronto Globe calls the book “a caviar and foie gras freefall of uninhibited, delicious and tantalizing sex.” And when you open it up to any page, you’re likely greeted with lines like the one where a husband is trying to get his wife to engage in group sex (“Not a desperate orgy but a nice relaxed spontaneous orgy”) or somebody ordering food described as “what looks like a very elegant streetwalker” asking for “Five slices of lean bacon, lean l-e-a-n bien cuit, pas de fat.” This book was passed off as smut when it came out. The male critics dismissed it as trash from the Erica Jong school of second-wave feminism. Those male critics are all probably dead and you’ve never heard of them. Trash rules everything around us now.

But that’s the wild thing about Blue Skies, No Candy. It’s trashy, but it’s the best kind. It’s also not trash. It’s well-written smut. I read the whole thing in one sitting. If somebody like Henry Miller (who she is compared to by one reviewer) can attain legend status for his fiction, Greene deserves at least a little consideration in that department. She was sure as hell more entertaining than Miller. If you see the book reissued in a few years, I could honestly see Greene getting the sort of second-look treatment that Eve Babitz rightfully had when NYRB Classics started putting her work back into print.

But the same goes for her food writing. It’s all part of one big story. Greene’s life, her outlook, her chutzpah. She truly did not seem to give any fucks and she wrote and did what she wanted and, more importantly, what made her happy. How incredible is that? I could be sad she’s gone, but I didn’t know her, and I came to her work just as she was winding down her career. So, yes, I’m sad we have one less legend living in this world. But I’m happy that I got to know Gael Greene, the one and only Insatiable Critic, through her work. She wrote a life that will live on for a long time.