Speaker 1: Ruthie's Table four is now a book. Paul McCartney, Michael Caine,
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris, David Beckham, Tina fey Elton John and many more.
Speaker 1: It's full of stories, beautifully designed, and a celebration of
Speaker 1: the way food connects us all. It's available now wherever
Speaker 1: you buy your books. Ruthie's Table four brought to you
Speaker 1: by Sky and Montclair. My brother Michael Elias is one
Speaker 1: of the most interesting and provocative people I know. When
Speaker 1: in doubt or I'm not sure what position to take
Speaker 1: on any subject, from the politics of the day to
Speaker 1: the Nicks winning or losing, I call him, and although
Speaker 1: he is in Los Angeles and I'm in London, he
Speaker 1: sets me in the right direction. Recently, though our calls
Speaker 1: have been about one important thing. His book, Bender's La
Speaker 1: compelling and beautifully written. As as Hero is a comedy
Speaker 1: writer in the nineteen seventies, navigating success and rejection, relationships
Speaker 1: and heartbreak, the political and the personal. Today, we're going
Speaker 1: to talk as if we were at the same table
Speaker 1: in the River Cafe, though he is Los Angeles and
Speaker 1: I'm in London, about writing, cooking, and most of all,
Speaker 1: this brilliant book vendors La. So, Michael, here, we are here, we.
Speaker 2: Are how are you? What's what? Six thousand miles, six.
Speaker 1: Thousand miles, a few oceans, valleys. It's so good to
Speaker 1: be with you. It's the beginning of your day in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. It's the end of my day in London.
Speaker 1: And I thought that, holding this book, there's so much
Speaker 1: that we want to discuss. There's so much for each
Speaker 1: of us to say. But I thought maybe the way
Speaker 1: we could begin this conversation is for you to read
Speaker 1: a paragraph from the book.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is about Bender in New York. In New York,
Speaker 2: Bender had.
Speaker 3: Submitted jokes and sketches to comedians and agents, earning money.
Speaker 3: As a substitute teacher in the public schools. He was
Speaker 3: a jack of all trades, adept at math, science, art, Spanish,
Speaker 3: facing rooms of surly adolescents ready to do combat with
Speaker 3: the sub He measured teaching days like a fur trapper.
Speaker 3: Counting pelts. Four pelts paid the rent at their apartment
Speaker 3: on the Lower East Side. Three brought groceries for a month,
Speaker 3: two got them movies and an off Broadway play and
Speaker 3: dinner in Chinatown. Ellen worked weekend nights at Joe Allen
Speaker 3: and fed Bender when she was on duty. They weren't poor,
Speaker 3: they weren't rich. They were two American immigrants in Manhattan,
Speaker 3: learning the language of the city, finding their burrows and
Speaker 3: nests in the village, then Soho, finally settling in the
Speaker 3: Lower east Side. Priced out of the world of Capote
Speaker 3: and Naylor, they didn't care or even notice they got by.
Speaker 3: Their apartment had a gas refrigerated, barred windows overlooking a
Speaker 3: field of junk and no sink in the bathroom, but
Speaker 3: Alan Ginsberg lived upstairs. They never ate in a restaurant
Speaker 3: that owned a law or lay, but alternated between Ratner's
Speaker 3: and Max's, with an occasional stop at the BNH or
Speaker 3: a fat egg roll at the entrance to the irt
Speaker 3: on astor place.
Speaker 1: That's a beautiful reading. Tell me, really, how do you
Speaker 1: see what this book is about.
Speaker 3: It's the Atomic Adventures or the Journey of Bender. He's
Speaker 3: a writer who comes from the seventies radical theater of
Speaker 3: New York to work in Hollywood, where he jogs with
Speaker 3: Burt Lancaster, He plays tennis with Abbey Hoffman. He hides
Speaker 3: a weather on the Ground member from the FBI. He
Speaker 3: even he goes back in time and falls in love
Speaker 3: with the young Marilyn Monroe. He's unhappily separated from his
Speaker 3: radical lawyer wife, helplessly attracted to a series of fascinating women,
Speaker 3: among them a fictional Ef Babbitts. He's got a really
Speaker 3: smart psychiatrist and a powerful agent, Neil Navitz.
Speaker 1: The last line of your book says Bender, hurry, food
Speaker 1: is getting cold, and that I think is a beautiful
Speaker 1: last sentence. But it also brings me to talk to
Speaker 1: you about food because so much of it takes place
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles restaurants, Dantana's, The Palm, a Maison Delicatestins.
Speaker 1: And so I suppose I was thinking, we have done
Speaker 1: a podcast with you about food, what you eat, what
Speaker 1: you cook, your memories of growing up. If I were
Speaker 1: having Bender on this podcast, and I would love to
Speaker 1: have because of his ca character. He was a person
Speaker 1: I would love to have interviewed. Would you have told
Speaker 1: me about his life and food?
Speaker 2: Oh, Bend.
Speaker 3: It brought his appetite from New York to Los Angeles,
Speaker 3: that's for sure. He found in Langers as Nora Ephron's
Speaker 3: ad the best POSTROOMI in the world. He found the
Speaker 3: city suburbs of Los Angeles that had the best Chinese
Speaker 3: restaurants in the world. He found and discovered Mexican food
Speaker 3: that he had never imagined. He saw supermarkets that were
Speaker 3: like football fields filled with the freshest produce one could imagine.
Speaker 3: He found Wolfgang Puck who had risen or emerged from
Speaker 3: Mammaison to Spago with Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton, and
Speaker 3: these were all they transformed the appetite of Los Angeles,
Speaker 3: and they made it exciting, and they had no boundaries.
Speaker 3: And we'll take a little bit from the Japanese cuisine
Speaker 3: and we'll add some Cambodian and it became eating in
Speaker 3: Los Angeles became a great adventure.
Speaker 2: And Bender enjoyed it all.
Speaker 1: He did enjoy it all. How do you find the
Speaker 1: food culture in Los Angeles right now?
Speaker 3: I hate to use the word better, but I think
Speaker 3: it is. The restaurants are varied, as I said, and
Speaker 3: their discoveries to be made all the time, and all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, everybody's flocking to Glendale for the best
Speaker 3: Armenian restaurants or Westward Boulevard with it, we call it
Speaker 3: Little Tehran. And the search for the perfect Hamburger, which
Speaker 3: I'm getting a little bored with. I have to say,
Speaker 3: I imagined a fortune teller looking into a crystal ball
Speaker 3: and saying, I see the end of the smash Burger.
Speaker 2: I hope. So.
Speaker 1: Reading the book myself and knowing the author very well,
Speaker 1: there is a sense of biographical in this novel. Did
Speaker 1: you ever think of writing it as a memoir instead
Speaker 1: of as a novel?
Speaker 3: Yes, but I chose to write it as a novel
Speaker 3: because I could invent things in my hero's life, Whereas
Speaker 3: if it were a memoir, I suppose I would have
Speaker 3: to tell the truth, which I enjoy writing fiction and
Speaker 3: making up events and embellishing probably a lot of What
Speaker 3: was my life in Hollywood?
Speaker 1: What was your life? Tell me about it.
Speaker 3: I came from New York, and I had a background
Speaker 3: in radical theater and the New York Off Broadway scene,
Speaker 3: the living theater of a Mama.
Speaker 1: Judson as an actor, or as.
Speaker 3: I started as an actor, and then I became a
Speaker 3: comedian and still keeping my career as an actor. But
Speaker 3: here I was with my partner Frank Shaw on the
Speaker 3: Johnny Carson Show, and a producer called and said, who
Speaker 3: writes your material? And we said, we do. He said,
Speaker 3: would you like to come to Hollywood and be writers?
Speaker 3: And we said yes? And then I said what about
Speaker 3: the act? And he said not interested. So we gave
Speaker 3: up the act, came to Hollywood and started writing comedy
Speaker 3: and what did you write?
Speaker 2: We first started writing.
Speaker 3: Variety shows Glenn Campbell, Smothers Brothers and Leslie Ugghams, and
Speaker 3: then we transitioned from We changed from variety shows which
Speaker 3: died out to sitcoms and we wrote All the Family
Speaker 3: and Mary Tyler Moore, and then I teamed up with
Speaker 3: rich Eustace and we created our own a half hour
Speaker 3: sitcom called Head of the Class, a show about high
Speaker 3: school students. But our take was they were really smart,
Speaker 3: and they were naive and unsophisticated about the real world,
Speaker 3: but they were all really smart. And then the last
Speaker 3: season was the Teacher and the star of the show
Speaker 3: was Billy Connolly and that one of the best experiences
Speaker 3: in my life. He was brilliant, inventive and it was great.
Speaker 3: I also wrote screenplays all during this time, and on
Speaker 3: one of the shows I worked with Steve Martin.
Speaker 2: We were both writers, but he was a writer.
Speaker 3: Who was becoming a comedian and I was an ex
Speaker 3: comedian who was becoming a writer, and we had a
Speaker 3: friendship and a collaboration and I ended up writing The
Speaker 3: Jerk with him and some specials and we've remained friends
Speaker 3: ever since.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just saw him. He's in London right now
Speaker 1: filming Murders in the building, so he and Marty Short
Speaker 1: are here, and he talked so compellingly really about writing
Speaker 1: The Jerk with you and the effect of that. And
Speaker 1: it's also interesting to think about what how much comedy
Speaker 1: and what you were working in terms of comedy when
Speaker 1: there was a kind of tumultuous political and social environment
Speaker 1: going on at that time, wasn't there.
Speaker 3: Well, it was a Vietnam War in the seventies, and
Speaker 3: it was it divided Hollywood in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: Those who were against the war. Jane Fonda down at Sutherland,
Speaker 3: there were Sds Tom Hayden, Black Panthers.
Speaker 2: It was a tumultuous time.
Speaker 3: And it's the same but you also had John Wayne
Speaker 3: on the other side, and Nixon was president, and so
Speaker 3: Hollywood was a really interesting place.
Speaker 1: At the time, coming from the theater and comedy to
Speaker 1: writing television. We know about the parallels between your life
Speaker 1: and Benders. You're going from New York to Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: But tell me more about as a writer creating this character.
Speaker 1: Tell me more about Bender.
Speaker 3: Bender gets by, he misses New York when he comes
Speaker 3: to love Los Angeles and its own incredible art world
Speaker 3: with Edrew Shea and Frank Romero, Patsy Valdez, Charlswood, Karabedian
Speaker 3: for Bender, I would says he gets to know La
Speaker 3: New York receipts. At the same time, Bender has his
Speaker 3: own confession to make about his betrayal of a friend.
Speaker 3: So he and all the time I think Bender survives.
Speaker 1: Yes, he does, he does. He really prevails. I think
Speaker 1: when I read it so visual as well, did you
Speaker 1: think about writing it as a movie? What compelled you
Speaker 1: to write this as a novel is apart from say
Speaker 1: a film.
Speaker 3: Raymond Chandler said, when you come to Hollywood, you're going
Speaker 3: to be a Hollywood writer. You better have something that
Speaker 3: you're writing that is yours and nobody can tell you
Speaker 3: how to change it. No producer can rewrite it, no
Speaker 3: director can rewrite it. And it's yours. Whether it could
Speaker 3: be a poem and essay, a play, whatever. And I
Speaker 3: always and the thing about writing a novel after years
Speaker 3: of writing screenplays and television shows, is that you control it.
Speaker 3: You're in charge until it's finished, and then you can
Speaker 3: work with an editor, of course, or a publisher. But
Speaker 3: that freedom to do what you want is what, at
Speaker 3: least that's what propelled me to really love and enjoy
Speaker 3: writing a novel.
Speaker 1: Bender comes to La, but he does miss his New York.
Speaker 1: And so you've told us what it took to get
Speaker 1: used to it. City where you have to drive everywhere,
Speaker 1: city that was just called a city, but as there
Speaker 1: was no there in many ways? Do you find that
Speaker 1: missing New York was that interesting to write for you?
Speaker 1: Did that feel very real to you.
Speaker 3: People?
Speaker 2: It was? It's funny people at the time.
Speaker 3: I would hear people say I missed New York a lot,
Speaker 3: and it turned out what they missed was Bloomingdale's and
Speaker 3: Broadway musicals, and I think that was I didn't miss that.
Speaker 3: I missed some ways. I missed my Chinatown, my living theater,
Speaker 3: the artist loft parties, the Bowery lofts, and all of
Speaker 3: a sudden, I found myself in a car culture which
Speaker 3: I wasn't used to. I found myself driving freeways. La
Speaker 3: was separate. It's almost like separate villages, and you had
Speaker 3: to learn to connect and navigate them. And that's what
Speaker 3: Bender does and the people, and once you discover it
Speaker 3: or get to know it, it's an amazing diverse place.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: We have neighborhoods that are labeled. We have a Filipino town,
Speaker 3: we have Korea Town, we have japan Town, we have
Speaker 3: Little Armenia, we have Little Tehran, and they have their restaurants.
Speaker 2: Their bookstore.
Speaker 3: So it's an amazing place to live now.
Speaker 1: The way that this book does feel like it couldn't
Speaker 1: be written in any other city. It was also an
Speaker 1: out friendship in Los Angeles, which brings me to your
Speaker 1: friend and Bender's friend based on if babbitts.
Speaker 3: Yes, I met even New York when she was working
Speaker 3: for the East Village Others and I was in the
Speaker 3: Living theater. We met a Salvador Dowley opening and we talked,
Speaker 3: and then she gave me your phone number and said,
Speaker 3: if you're ever in La call me, and I did.
Speaker 3: And that was the beginning of a forty year friendship
Speaker 3: and a collaboration. And I'm a character in her books,
Speaker 3: and she became a character in my book. She's me me,
Speaker 3: and she spent her moral guide almost in his life
Speaker 3: and is his constant friend and closest friend all throughout
Speaker 3: the novel, as she was in my life. The other
Speaker 3: thing about Eve is said, when I arrived, she brought
Speaker 3: me into her family. And her father was a classical violinist,
Speaker 3: her mother was an artist, and her sister designer. And
Speaker 3: it was great to happen. Well, it was to arrive
Speaker 3: in Los Angeles and find a family.
Speaker 1: When you were writing about her, did it bring back
Speaker 1: a lot of the times that you had?
Speaker 3: It was revisiting our friendship. And she was an important
Speaker 3: part of my life and an important part of the
Speaker 3: LA literary scene at the time, and even more so now.
Speaker 1: And I think, why do you say more so now.
Speaker 3: There's been a revival of her work thanks to her
Speaker 3: a longtime agent, Erica Silverman, who got her books all republished.
Speaker 3: And it's funny. When I was living in Paris, sometimes
Speaker 3: I would meet a writer who would ask where I'm from.
Speaker 3: I would say La and they would say, oh, wow,
Speaker 3: do you know Eve Babbitts And I did. And also,
Speaker 3: of course Lily Anilik, who wrote a biography of Eve
Speaker 3: and alongside of this. My publisher is taking Place Books
Speaker 3: is publishing two screenplays that Eve and I wrote together.
Speaker 3: One was turned into a French movie called Envoy a
Speaker 3: Les v Alone and the other one remember Pearl Harbor,
Speaker 3: about Hollywood right after the Second World War. It's more
Speaker 3: of a Hollywood noir. We had a great time writing them,
Speaker 3: and I'm so glad that Sticking Placebooks publish them.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about your writing. Do you have a routine?
Speaker 1: Do you eat before you sit down? Do you take breaks?
Speaker 1: How does food enter your working day?
Speaker 3: Unfortunately I live within walking distance of a refrigerator.
Speaker 2: But I'm pretty good about it now.
Speaker 3: I you said, joked that my writing schedule was avoiding
Speaker 3: it as long as I could, until I couldn't do
Speaker 3: it anymore. Then I started writing, and I find great
Speaker 3: comfort in my relationship with my computer. And you said,
Speaker 3: be what I think a writer would take a break?
Speaker 3: Walk around the block. And now I take a break
Speaker 3: and I don't know, read the Huffington Post or listen
Speaker 3: to your podcast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm calling from the middle of London. And I
Speaker 1: walked into this meeting room that a friend hasn't led
Speaker 1: me in his restaurant, of all places, I'm talking to
Speaker 1: you from another person's restaurant, and she said, what is
Speaker 1: what are you carrying? What is that book? And I
Speaker 1: told her and she said, what a beautiful cover. And
Speaker 1: we don't tell a book by its cover. But I
Speaker 1: know that you are an art collector. I know that
Speaker 1: you have his sister as we both do as a painter.
Speaker 1: We know that museums are your first stop in a city,
Speaker 1: and so it isn't surprising to me that you have
Speaker 1: this beautiful work of art on your cover. Tell me
Speaker 1: the process of choosing the cover of the book.
Speaker 3: The cover was designed or made by Devorah Blom, who's
Speaker 3: done a series of beautiful portraits of Los Angeles. And
Speaker 3: we plan another edition, a hardcover where every chapter will
Speaker 3: include one of her drawings of Los Angeles. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: that was really lucky.
Speaker 1: Find Benders la Is on seld Where and tell me
Speaker 1: how we can buy copies of this book.
Speaker 3: You can get it from the publishers, Sticking Place books
Speaker 3: and I hope and bookstores in London.
Speaker 1: It is and it's for sale, and it's for sale
Speaker 1: in the River Cafe, so you can have a meal
Speaker 1: and buy a book. The other question that we ask
Speaker 1: every guest at the end of the interview, and it
Speaker 1: will be my last question to you is what do
Speaker 1: you think Bender's comfort food would be? If Bender needed comfort,
Speaker 1: he would want to prepare or have prepared for him.
Speaker 3: Bender would prepare it. He's got a big appetite and
Speaker 3: he likes to cook, so if he had the River
Speaker 3: Cafe cookbook in hand, he would make a comfort meal.
Speaker 3: It would start with ricotta al four note, then risotto
Speaker 3: con pizilli and pork cooked in milk. The dessert, he
Speaker 3: wouldn't tackle the chocolate nemesis or the caramel ice cream,
Speaker 3: so dessert would be a peach.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Michael, and thank you Bender Benders written by
Speaker 1: Michael Elias and on sale now. I really tell you
Speaker 1: all of you listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, go
Speaker 1: and enjoy this book. Thank you Michael, Thank you.
Speaker 3: Ruthie's Table Fur was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton,
Speaker 3: and Zad Rodgers with Andrew Sang and Bella Selina.
Speaker 2: This has been an atomized production for iHeartMedia.