. . . Winter 2003
A nondescript car pulled up to a plain roadside eatery in central Connecticut. A couple got out and walked inside. He was tall and lean and looked like a scholar. She was hearty and full-figured. They joined two other diners, examined the menus and began to talk about the available dishes with a clinical curiosity. They were pros, working undercover as usual, staking out this joint while trying to conceal their purpose from the waitress who came to take orders. "Are your baked beans special?" the man asked, pointing to the menu's illustration touting the beans. "What do you mean?" the waitress replied. "Are they special or are they rather much the same as I might buy at a grocery?" "They're much the same." No one ordered the beans, and the rest of the fare also fit the "much the same" category. The place was too ordinary to make the next edition of Roadfood, which will be the fifth for Michael and Jane Stern's best-selling series. Since the first edition in 1978, the Sterns have continuously compiled and recompiled their compendium of notable, accessible restaurants as they criss-cross the country (Eat Your Way Across the USA is just one of their many other literary servings for food junkies.)
A banquet of talkThe menu that day in their home state did not whet hunger but it did stimulate conversation. The Sterns serve a banquet of talk, throughout which it becomes clear that the governing principle of their literary output is insight, not appetite. Trained as art historians, Michael at Michigan ('68 BA), Columbia and Yale and Jane at Pratt Institute and Yale, the Sterns were among the first to push the boundaries of their field past the borders of high art and into the provinces of popular culture. It started with their linking of cowboys and truckers as American archetypes. "In 1971, we pitched the idea to the great editor and publisher Robert Gottlieb that truck drivers were our country's last cowboys," Michael recalled. The notion excited Gottlieb, and the Sterns hit the highways, trailing truckers. "We soon realized we had to eat something while we were on the road, so we asked the truckers for advice," Michael continued. "They steered us to places along the road where they liked to eat." Two years later they completed the photo essay book Trucker: A Portait of the Last American Cowboy (McGraw-Hill, 1976). Gottlieb asked them what they wanted to do next. "We knew we were amateur eaters," Jane said, "but the idea of recognizing America's regional food was just beginning back then with Calvin Trillin's early writings on the subject. Of course Duncan Hines had really started it some 60 years ago." Result: the first Roadfood.
Their first best-seller was Elvis World (Knopf, 1987), one of the first works on Presley that treated him as a global phenomenon rather than a popular music personality. "We got the idea and the approval for the book on August 16, 1985," Michael said, "while we were talking with Bob Gottlieb. It was the 10th anniversary of Elvis's death but we didn't realize it then. We pitched the idea, and Bob lay back on his sofa and mused about it for some moments. Then he said, 'OK. Do it.' He was a publisher of the old schoo—lautocratic, visionary, no contracts."
Jane held up her shrimp approvingly: "Look. They're the shape shrimps were in the 1950s," she says, pointing to the two finny "handles" on the hump-shaped shrimp smothered in deep-fried batter. The '50s continue to be a special era for the Sterns, not just for the emergence of Elvis and truckers but also for film masters like Douglas Sirk and the King and Queen of the Cowboys, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.
King and Queen of the Cowboys"We began Happy Trails: Our Life Story [Simon & Schuster, 1994] the 'as told to' book with me doing the Roy section and Jane worked with Dale," Michael began. "But soon we switched," added Jane, perhaps demonstrating by her interjection the couple's compositional method. (A constant flow of alternating mental current may fuel their prolificacy, because the interview notes show that it became increasingly hard to keep track of who was saying what in their seamless discourse.) "It turned out I could channel Roy, and Michael could do Dale. That's just the way it worked out."
The writing trail almost dead-ended at their first meeting with Roy and Dale. "We were riding in their car," Michael said, "and Jane pointed out that all four of us had been born within days of each other in late October. 'We're all Scorpios!' she said and suggested that was why we were hitting it off so well. But Dale and Roy fell silent. Then, after several moments, Dale said, 'Honey, we think that stuff is satanic!'" "I said nothing more about astrology," Jane said. "They were amazing people," Michael continued. "They endured a lot of pain. Both of their adopted children died relatively young, and their only natural child died of Down syndrome at two. Their publicists advised them to keep the grievous episodes to themselves, but instead Dale wrote a book about it to help other parents, and it's still in print." Easygoing and friendly as the onscreen cowboy king, Roy was a "shy and lonely fellow" in private life, Michael said. "His favorite pastime was to visit junkyards and flea markets by himself. He depended on Dale whenever there was socializing to do." Rogers was in his 80s and "almost stone deaf from the unmuffled gunshots fired near his ears during decades of acting in movies and TV shows," Michael said. "If we arrived to interview them and Dale was out, Roy was usually sitting in front of his giant TV, looking at the This Is Your Life show about him and Dale, which he played at ear-splitting volume.
"And he was the worst driver in the world. He drove just the same way he rode Triggerfull tilt, turning any way he wished at any speed he pleased regardless of red lights, stop signs or one-way arrows. I said, 'Jane, we're going to die in this car. And what will our obits say? 'Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Die in Car Crash, Two Unidentified Victims in Back Seat.'"
Bowling ball and bug sprayRogers's biggest cowboy rival in the '50s was Gene Autry, with the older Hopalong Cassidy a distant third. Michael: "Gene and Roy were a striking contrast," Jane: "The difference in their museums says it all. The Autry museum is like the Frick of Western museums. It has exquisite, rare memorabilia." Michael: "Roy and Dale's museum is like a big Quonset hut filled with crap in Victorville, California, a dry, hot, out-of-the-way place. Exhibits include his favorite bowling ball, his bug spray—but also his ode to a dead child. It's kitschy, schlocky but also quite genuinely touching here and there." (The Sterns are masters at critiquing, even celebrating, the awful; see their The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste for Harper Collins [1990], still selling strongly worldwide in several translations.)
Talk of cowboys reminded Jane of another friend, Oklahoman Jim Shoulders, "the Babe Ruth of rodeo stars." The Sterns met Shoulders and his wife while writing Way Out West (Harper Collins, 1993), an exploration of popular culture in the West. Michael: "He has won more than 16 national riding championships and more rodeo contests than anyone. He's broken about every bone in his body, but his mark still stands because he competed even with broken bones. He even designed a cast that he could take off when he wanted to hide a broken forearm from meet officials who would have barred him from competition." The Sterns digressed on the slim pickings some states offer in recommendable restaurants. Michael: "For the first time in 25 years we found a place in Delaware. But in New Hampshirenothing, ever, except pancakes. Jane: Wyoming is hard. Oklahoma, too, except steaks. They're raising a new breed of cattle, a salorn, in Oklahoma and promoting it as health-conscious beef. It's a mixture of lean, unflavorful longhorn and another breed."
Rocky Mountain oysters and clamsThat brought Michael back to their recent visit with Jim Shoulders and his wife. "Jim wanted us to try some salorn steaks. As we sat together, he was popping down Rocky Mountain oysters one after the other as an appetizer. It took us a while to figure out what they were. We said, 'At first, we thought you were eating fried clams.' 'Fried clams!' he said. 'How can you people eat those things?' That's my example of the range in regional tastes in this country." When it was time to eat the bland but healthy low-fat salorn, Jane said, the Shoulders "dipped it in batter, deep-fried it, coated it with sausage gravy and said, 'Now you can see how good lean beef tastes!'" Strong stomachs are an obvious prerequisite for the Sterns' encounters with gustatory regionalism. Dangers abound. Michael: "A place near where we live in West Redding, Connecticut, is famous for food poisonings. Jane is an emergency medical technician, and she's seen the fast food sandwiches from this franchise of a global chain knock out kids within 15 minutes. We even use the restaurant's name as a code for our diagnosis of food poisoning." Jane: "We were in a little restaurant in St. Louis recently and saw a raw chicken propping open a rear door. We lost our appetite and fled." |
Michael
Stern '68
Checking
out road food, however, is perhaps the smallest fish they fry, mere
sustenance for the effort needed to write the 14 other books they've
produced since 1976, almost all collaborations.
