James Beard

James Beard born 5 May 1903 (d. 1985)

James Beard was an American chef and food writer. Although little known outside the US, James Beard is recognised by many as the father of American gastronomy.

James Beard was born in Portland, Oregon.

He trained initially as a singer and actor, and moved to New York City in 1937. Not having much luck in the theatre, he and his friend, Bill Rhodes, capitalised on the cocktail party craze by opening a catering company, Hors D'Oeuvre, Inc. which led the publication of Beard's first cookbook, Hors D'Oeuvre and Canapés, a compilation of his catering recipes. Rationing difficulties in World War 2 brought his catering business to a halt. In 1946 he appeared on an early televised cooking show, I Love to Eat on NBC, and thus began his rise as an eminent American food authority.

Over the next forty years, James Beard operated a cooking school out of his apartment in New York, wrote dozens of books on cooking and food, and hundreds of articles on food for many different magazines.

According to the James Beard Foundation website: 'In 1955, he established The James Beard Cooking School. He continued to teach cooking to men and women for the next 30 years, both at his own schools (in New York City and Seaside, Oregon), and around the country at women's clubs, other cooking schools, and civic groups. He was a tireless traveller, bringing his message of good food, honestly prepared with fresh, wholesome, American ingredients, to a country just becoming aware of its own culinary heritage.'

James Beard brought French cooking to the American middle and upper classes in the 1950s. Beard starred on TV as a cooking personality. He generated further income and financed his cooking schools by signing endorsement deals with various brands.

In 1981, along with friend Gael Greene, Beard founded Citymeals-on-Wheels, which continues to help feed the home-bound elderly in New York City.

Beard died 21 January 1985 in New York City of heart failure at the age of 81.

After Beard's death in 1985, his friends and former students organised the purchase of his New York residence to establish and permanently house the James Beard Foundation. The James Beard Foundation was set up in Beard's honour to provide scholarships to aspiring food professionals and to champion the American culinary tradition — which Beard helped create.

Beard's renovated brownstone is located at 167 West 12th Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. It is North America's only historical culinary centre, a place where Foundation members, the press, and the general public are encouraged to savour the creations of both established and emerging chefs from across the country and around the globe.

The annual James Beard Foundation Awards are given at the industry's biggest party, part of a fortnight of activities that celebrate fine cuisine and Beard's birthday. The Awards ceremony honours the finest chefs, restaurants, journalists, cookbook authors, restaurant designers, and electronic media professionals in the country.

Nigel Slater

Nigel Slater born 9 April 1958

Nigel Slater is an award-winning British food writer, journalist and broadcaster. He has written a column for The Observer Magazine for over a decade and is the principal writer for the Observer Food Monthly supplement. Prior to this, Slater was food writer for Marie Claire for five years. He also serves as art director for his books.

Although best known for uncomplicated, comfort-food recipes presented in early best-selling books such as The 30-Minute Cook and Real Fast Food, he became known to a wide audience with the publication of Toast: The Story of A Boy's Hunger, a moving and award-winning autobiography focused on his love of food, his childhood, his family relationships (his mother died of asthma when he was nine), and his burgeoning sexuality. The book was published in October 2004 and became a best-seller after it was featured on the Richard and Judy Book Club.

In 1998 Slater hosted the Channel 4 series Nigel Slater's Real Food Show. He returned to TV in 2006 hosting the chat/food show A Taste of My Life for BBC One.

His latest book, Eating for England: The Delights & Eccentricities of the British at Table, is devoted to English food and cookery. It was published in October 2007 and was described in The Times as 'the sort of ragbag of choice culinary morsels that would pass the time nicely on a train journey'.

He describes himself as a cook who writes and insists he is not a chef.

Nigel Slater Official Website
Interview with The Observer about his childhood, love of food and writing.

James Coco

James Coco born 21 March 1930 (d. 1987)

James Coco was an American character actor.

Born in New York City, Coco began acting as a child. As an overweight and prematurely balding adult, he found himself relegated to character roles. He made his Broadway debut in Hotel Paradiso in 1957, but his first major recognition was for off-Broadway's The Moon in Yellow River, for which he won an Obie Award. For the next several years he worked steadily in commercials and on stage.

Coco's first collaboration with playwright Terrence McNally was an off-Broadway double-bill of one-act plays entitled Sweet Eros/Witness (1968), followed by Here's Where I Belong, a disastrous Broadway musical adaptation of East of Eden that closed on opening night. They had far greater success with their next project, Next, which ran for more than 700 performances and won Coco the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance. Sixteen years later, the two would reunite for the Manhattan Theatre Club production of It's Only a Play.

Coco also achieved success with Neil Simon, who wrote The Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969) specifically for him [pictured with Doris Roberts]. It won him a Tony Award nomination as Best Actor in a Play. The two later joined forces for a Broadway revival of the musical Little Me and the films Murder By Death, The Cheap Detective, and Only When I Laugh, for which he was Oscar-nominated.

Coco's additional film credits include Ensign Pulver, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, Man of La Mancha, Such Good Friends, A New Leaf, The Wild Party, and The Muppets Take Manhattan.

On television, Coco starred in two unsuccessful 1970s series and made guest appearances on many shows, including Marcus Welby, M.D., Fantasy Island, Murder, She Wrote, The Love Boat, and St. Elsewhere, for which he won an Emmy Award. One of his last TV assignments was a recurring role on the sitcom Who's The Boss?.

In his final years, Coco became known for his cooking prowess, publishing several best-selling cookbooks and making frequent guest appearances on talk shows garbed in a chef's hat and apron.

Coco died of a heart attack in New York City in 1987 at the age of 56.

Edwin Denby

Edwin Denby orn 4 February 1903 (d. 1983)

Edwin Orr Denby was one of the most important and influential American dance critics of the 20th century, as well as a poet and novelist. His dance reviews and essays were collected in Looking at the Dance (1949, reprinted 1968), Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets (1965) and Dance Writings (1986). His works of poetry include In Public, In Private (1948), Mediterranean Cities (1956), Snoring in New York (1974), Collected Poems (1975) and The Complete Poems (1986). Denby's only novel, Mrs W’s Last Sandwich (also released as Scream in a Cave) was published in 1972.

The son of Charles Denby, Jr. and Martha Dalzell Orr, Edwin was born in Tientsin, China in 1903, where Charles had been appointed as Chief foreign advisor to Yuan Shikai a year earlier. Edwin's grandfather, Charles Harvey Denby, who had served as United States Ambassador to China for an unprecedented 13 years, died when Edwin was one. Edwin spent his childhood first in Shanghai, then in Vienna, where his father served as consul general from 1909-1915, before coming to the United States in 1916. He was educated at Hotchkiss, and attended Harvard but failed to graduate. He also attended classes at the University of Vienna, before obtaining a diploma in gymnastics (with specialty in modern dance) at the Hellerau-Laxenburg school in Vienna in 1928. He performed for several years, notably with the State Theater of Darmstadt.

Looking for someone to take his passport photo, he encountered photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt in Switzerland in 1934, and the two remained inseparable for the rest of Denby's life. The following year, they returned to New York and rented a loft for eighteen dollars a month in a five-story walk-up building on West 21st Street in Chelsea. Edwin's friendship with painter Willem de Kooning, who lived one floor below in the adjacent building, began shortly thereafter when de Kooning's kitten turned up on the fire-escape outside of Edwin's window one evening.

In 1935, soon after Denby's return to New York, Orson Welles and John Houseman asked him to adapt Eugène Labiche's Un Chapeau de Paille d'Italie for the stage. The play, titled Horse Eats Hat was scored by Paul Bowles and was performed as a Works Progress Administration Federal Theatre Production in 1936. During his lifetime, being ambivalent about the publication of his poetry, he was known primarily as a dance critic. At the behest of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, he began writing a dance column for the magazine Modern Music in 1936. In 1943, Thomson drafted Denby as the dance critic for the Herald Tribune.

On Tuesday, July 12, 1983, at the summer house he maintained with Burckhardt in Searsmont Maine, he committed suicide; he had been ill and increasingly concerned about the loss of his mental powers.

Denby was inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame in 2002.

Lucius Beebe

Lucius Beebe born 9 December 1902 (d. 1966)

Lucius Morris Beebe was an American author, gourmand, photographer, railway historian, journalist, and syndicated columnist.

Lucius Beebe was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, to a prominent Boston family. Beebe attended both Harvard University and Yale University. During his tenure at boarding school and university, Beebe was known for his numerous pranks. His pranks were not without consequence and he proudly noted that he had the sole distinction of having been expelled from both Harvard and Yale, at the insistence, respectively, of the president and dean of each. Beebe eventually was readmitted to Harvard where he earned his undergraduate degree in 1926.

During and immediately after obtaining his degree from Harvard, Beebe published several books of poetry, but eventually found his true calling in journalism. He worked as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, the Boston Telegram, and the Boston Evening Transcript and was a contributing writer to many magazines such as Gourmet, The New Yorker, Town and Country, Holiday, American Heritage and Playboy.

Beebe wrote a syndicated column for the New York Herald Tribune from the 1930s through 1944 called This New York. The column chronicled the doings of fashionable society at such storied restaurants and nightclubs as El Morocco, the 21 Club, the Stork Club, and the Colony. Mr Beebe is credited with inventing the term 'cafe society' which was used to describe the people mentioned in his column.

In 1960 Beebe began work with the San Francisco Chronicle where he wrote a syndicated column, This Wild West. During the six years that he wrote the column, Beebe covered such topics as economics, politics, journalism, religion, history, morals, justice, finance and travel.

In addition to his work as a journalist, Beebe wrote over 30 books. His books dealt primarily with railroading and café society. Many of his railway books were written with longtime companion, Charles Clegg.

Along with Clegg, Beebe owned two private railcars, the Gold Coast and The Virginia City. The Gold Coast, Georgia Northern / Central of Georgia No. 100, was built in 1905 and is now at the California State Railroad Museum. After Beebe and Clegg purchased The Virginia City they had it refurbished and redecorated by famed Hollywood set designer Robert Hanley in a style known as Venetian Renaissance Baroque. The Virginia City has been restored and currently operates as an excursion carriage.

Beebe was also a noted partisan of the Cunard Line and passenger liner travel in general. He wrote several articles about trans-Atlantic passage on Cunard ships during the 'Golden Era' of the 20s, 30s and 40s.

A noted boulevardier, Beebe had an impressive and baroque wardrobe. Beebe's clothing included 40 suits, at least two mink-lined overcoats, numerous top hats and bowlers, a collection of doeskin gloves, walking sticks, and a substantial gold nugget watch chain. Columnist Walter Winchell referred to Beebe and his wardrobe as 'Luscious Lucius'. Beebe's sartorial splendor was recognised when he appeared in full formal day attire on the cover of Life over the title of 'Lucius Beebe Sets a Style'.

Many of Beebe's articles and columns addressed men's traditional fashion. He was especially fond of English bespoke tailoring and shoes and wrote glowing articles about noted court tailor Henry Poole and Company and noted bootmaker John Lobb, whom he patronised on a regular basis. He also liked men's hats and wrote of the history of the bowler hat.

In 1940, Beebe met Charles Clegg while both were houseguests at the Washington, D.C. home of Evalyn Walsh McLean. The two soon developed a personal and professional relationship that continued for the rest of Beebe's life. By the standards of the era, the homosexual relationship Beebe and Clegg shared was relatively open and well-known.

The pair initially lived in New York City, where both men were prominent in café society circles. Eventually tiring of that social life, the two moved in 1950 to Virginia City, Nevada, a tiny community that had once been a fabled mining boom town. There, they reactivated and began publishing the Territorial Enterprise, a fabled 19th century newspaper that had once been the employer of Mark Twain. Beebe and Clegg shared a renovated mansion in the town, travelled extensively, and remained prominent in social circles.

Clegg and Beebe sold the Territorial Enterprise in 1961, and purchased a home in suburban San Francisco. They continued the writing, photography, and travel that had marked their lives until Beebe's death from a heart attack in 1966, at the age of 64. Clegg committed suicide in 1979, on the day that he reached the precise age at which Beebe had died.