Bonus: Michael Elias on his new book, Bender's LA

0:00Speaker 1:Ruthie's Table four is now a book. Paul McCartney, Michael Caine, Kamala Harris, David Beckham, Tina fey Elton John and many more. It's full of stories, beautifully designed, and a celebration of the way food connects us all. It's available now wherever you buy your books. Ruthie's Table four brought to you by Sky and Montclair. My brother Michael Elias is one of the most interesting and provocative people I know. When in doubt or I'm not sure what position to take on any subject, from the politics of the day to the Nicks winning or losing, I call him, and although he is in Los Angeles and I'm in London, he sets me in the right direction. Recently, though our calls have been about one important thing. His book, Bender's La compelling and beautifully written. As as Hero is a comedy writer in the nineteen seventies, navigating success and rejection, relationships and heartbreak, the political and the personal. Today, we're going to talk as if we were at the same table in the River Cafe, though he is Los Angeles and I'm in London, about writing, cooking, and most of all, this brilliant book vendors La. So, Michael, here, we are here, we.

1:30Speaker 2:Are how are you? What's what? Six thousand miles, six.

1:34Speaker 1:Thousand miles, a few oceans, valleys. It's so good to be with you. It's the beginning of your day in Los Angeles. It's the end of my day in London. And I thought that, holding this book, there's so much that we want to discuss. There's so much for each of us to say. But I thought maybe the way we could begin this conversation is for you to read a paragraph from the book.

2:00Speaker 2:Okay, this is about Bender in New York. In New York, Bender had.

2:05Speaker 3:Submitted jokes and sketches to comedians and agents, earning money. As a substitute teacher in the public schools. He was a jack of all trades, adept at math, science, art, Spanish, facing rooms of surly adolescents ready to do combat with the sub He measured teaching days like a fur trapper. Counting pelts. Four pelts paid the rent at their apartment on the Lower East Side. Three brought groceries for a month, two got them movies and an off Broadway play and dinner in Chinatown. Ellen worked weekend nights at Joe Allen and fed Bender when she was on duty. They weren't poor, they weren't rich. They were two American immigrants in Manhattan, learning the language of the city, finding their burrows and nests in the village, then Soho, finally settling in the Lower east Side. Priced out of the world of Capote and Naylor, they didn't care or even notice they got by.

3:05Speaker 3:Their apartment had a gas refrigerated, barred windows overlooking a field of junk and no sink in the bathroom, but Alan Ginsberg lived upstairs. They never ate in a restaurant that owned a law or lay, but alternated between Ratner's and Max's, with an occasional stop at the BNH or a fat egg roll at the entrance to the irt on astor place.

3:29Speaker 1:That's a beautiful reading. Tell me, really, how do you see what this book is about.

3:35Speaker 3:It's the Atomic Adventures or the Journey of Bender. He's a writer who comes from the seventies radical theater of New York to work in Hollywood, where he jogs with Burt Lancaster, He plays tennis with Abbey Hoffman. He hides a weather on the Ground member from the FBI. He even he goes back in time and falls in love with the young Marilyn Monroe. He's unhappily separated from his radical lawyer wife, helplessly attracted to a series of fascinating women, among them a fictional Ef Babbitts. He's got a really smart psychiatrist and a powerful agent, Neil Navitz.

4:20Speaker 1:The last line of your book says Bender, hurry, food is getting cold, and that I think is a beautiful last sentence. But it also brings me to talk to you about food because so much of it takes place in Los Angeles restaurants, Dantana's, The Palm, a Maison Delicatestins. And so I suppose I was thinking, we have done a podcast with you about food, what you eat, what you cook, your memories of growing up. If I were having Bender on this podcast, and I would love to have because of his ca character. He was a person I would love to have interviewed. Would you have told me about his life and food?

5:07Speaker 2:Oh, Bend.

5:08Speaker 3:It brought his appetite from New York to Los Angeles, that's for sure. He found in Langers as Nora Ephron's ad the best POSTROOMI in the world. He found the city suburbs of Los Angeles that had the best Chinese restaurants in the world. He found and discovered Mexican food that he had never imagined. He saw supermarkets that were like football fields filled with the freshest produce one could imagine. He found Wolfgang Puck who had risen or emerged from Mammaison to Spago with Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton, and these were all they transformed the appetite of Los Angeles, and they made it exciting, and they had no boundaries.

5:58Speaker 3:And we'll take a little bit from the Japanese cuisine and we'll add some Cambodian and it became eating in Los Angeles became a great adventure.

6:08Speaker 2:And Bender enjoyed it all.

6:09Speaker 1:He did enjoy it all. How do you find the food culture in Los Angeles right now?

6:16Speaker 3:I hate to use the word better, but I think it is. The restaurants are varied, as I said, and their discoveries to be made all the time, and all of a sudden, everybody's flocking to Glendale for the best Armenian restaurants or Westward Boulevard with it, we call it Little Tehran. And the search for the perfect Hamburger, which I'm getting a little bored with. I have to say, I imagined a fortune teller looking into a crystal ball and saying, I see the end of the smash Burger.

6:52Speaker 2:I hope. So.

6:54Speaker 1:Reading the book myself and knowing the author very well, there is a sense of biographical in this novel. Did you ever think of writing it as a memoir instead of as a novel?

7:08Speaker 3:Yes, but I chose to write it as a novel because I could invent things in my hero's life, Whereas if it were a memoir, I suppose I would have to tell the truth, which I enjoy writing fiction and making up events and embellishing probably a lot of What was my life in Hollywood?

7:28Speaker 1:What was your life? Tell me about it.

7:31Speaker 3:I came from New York, and I had a background in radical theater and the New York Off Broadway scene, the living theater of a Mama.

7:38Speaker 1:Judson as an actor, or as.

7:41Speaker 3:I started as an actor, and then I became a comedian and still keeping my career as an actor. But here I was with my partner Frank Shaw on the Johnny Carson Show, and a producer called and said, who writes your material? And we said, we do. He said, would you like to come to Hollywood and be writers? And we said yes? And then I said what about the act? And he said not interested. So we gave up the act, came to Hollywood and started writing comedy and what did you write?

8:13Speaker 2:We first started writing.

8:14Speaker 3:Variety shows Glenn Campbell, Smothers Brothers and Leslie Ugghams, and then we transitioned from We changed from variety shows which died out to sitcoms and we wrote All the Family and Mary Tyler Moore, and then I teamed up with rich Eustace and we created our own a half hour sitcom called Head of the Class, a show about high school students. But our take was they were really smart, and they were naive and unsophisticated about the real world, but they were all really smart. And then the last season was the Teacher and the star of the show was Billy Connolly and that one of the best experiences in my life. He was brilliant, inventive and it was great.

9:05Speaker 3:I also wrote screenplays all during this time, and on one of the shows I worked with Steve Martin.

9:10Speaker 2:We were both writers, but he was a writer.

9:13Speaker 3:Who was becoming a comedian and I was an ex comedian who was becoming a writer, and we had a friendship and a collaboration and I ended up writing The Jerk with him and some specials and we've remained friends ever since.

9:28Speaker 1:Yeah, I just saw him. He's in London right now filming Murders in the building, so he and Marty Short are here, and he talked so compellingly really about writing The Jerk with you and the effect of that. And it's also interesting to think about what how much comedy and what you were working in terms of comedy when there was a kind of tumultuous political and social environment going on at that time, wasn't there.

9:56Speaker 3:Well, it was a Vietnam War in the seventies, and it was it divided Hollywood in a lot of ways. Those who were against the war. Jane Fonda down at Sutherland, there were Sds Tom Hayden, Black Panthers.

10:12Speaker 2:It was a tumultuous time.

10:13Speaker 3:And it's the same but you also had John Wayne on the other side, and Nixon was president, and so Hollywood was a really interesting place.

10:21Speaker 1:At the time, coming from the theater and comedy to writing television. We know about the parallels between your life and Benders. You're going from New York to Los Angeles. But tell me more about as a writer creating this character. Tell me more about Bender.

10:39Speaker 3:Bender gets by, he misses New York when he comes to love Los Angeles and its own incredible art world with Edrew Shea and Frank Romero, Patsy Valdez, Charlswood, Karabedian for Bender, I would says he gets to know La New York receipts. At the same time, Bender has his own confession to make about his betrayal of a friend. So he and all the time I think Bender survives.

11:09Speaker 1:Yes, he does, he does. He really prevails. I think when I read it so visual as well, did you think about writing it as a movie? What compelled you to write this as a novel is apart from say a film.

11:23Speaker 3:Raymond Chandler said, when you come to Hollywood, you're going to be a Hollywood writer. You better have something that you're writing that is yours and nobody can tell you how to change it. No producer can rewrite it, no director can rewrite it. And it's yours. Whether it could be a poem and essay, a play, whatever. And I always and the thing about writing a novel after years of writing screenplays and television shows, is that you control it. You're in charge until it's finished, and then you can work with an editor, of course, or a publisher. But that freedom to do what you want is what, at least that's what propelled me to really love and enjoy writing a novel.

12:05Speaker 1:Bender comes to La, but he does miss his New York. And so you've told us what it took to get used to it. City where you have to drive everywhere, city that was just called a city, but as there was no there in many ways? Do you find that missing New York was that interesting to write for you? Did that feel very real to you.

12:29Speaker 3:People?

12:29Speaker 2:It was? It's funny people at the time.

12:32Speaker 3:I would hear people say I missed New York a lot, and it turned out what they missed was Bloomingdale's and Broadway musicals, and I think that was I didn't miss that. I missed some ways. I missed my Chinatown, my living theater, the artist loft parties, the Bowery lofts, and all of a sudden, I found myself in a car culture which I wasn't used to. I found myself driving freeways. La was separate. It's almost like separate villages, and you had to learn to connect and navigate them. And that's what Bender does and the people, and once you discover it or get to know it, it's an amazing diverse place.

13:20Speaker 2:Now.

13:20Speaker 3:We have neighborhoods that are labeled. We have a Filipino town, we have Korea Town, we have japan Town, we have Little Armenia, we have Little Tehran, and they have their restaurants.

13:36Speaker 2:Their bookstore.

13:37Speaker 3:So it's an amazing place to live now.

13:41Speaker 1:The way that this book does feel like it couldn't be written in any other city. It was also an out friendship in Los Angeles, which brings me to your friend and Bender's friend based on if babbitts.

13:56Speaker 3:Yes, I met even New York when she was working for the East Village Others and I was in the Living theater. We met a Salvador Dowley opening and we talked, and then she gave me your phone number and said, if you're ever in La call me, and I did. And that was the beginning of a forty year friendship and a collaboration. And I'm a character in her books, and she became a character in my book. She's me me, and she spent her moral guide almost in his life and is his constant friend and closest friend all throughout the novel, as she was in my life. The other thing about Eve is said, when I arrived, she brought me into her family. And her father was a classical violinist, her mother was an artist, and her sister designer. And it was great to happen. Well, it was to arrive in Los Angeles and find a family.

14:49Speaker 1:When you were writing about her, did it bring back a lot of the times that you had?

14:53Speaker 3:It was revisiting our friendship. And she was an important part of my life and an important part of the LA literary scene at the time, and even more so now.

15:06Speaker 1:And I think, why do you say more so now.

15:10Speaker 3:There's been a revival of her work thanks to her a longtime agent, Erica Silverman, who got her books all republished. And it's funny. When I was living in Paris, sometimes I would meet a writer who would ask where I'm from. I would say La and they would say, oh, wow, do you know Eve Babbitts And I did. And also, of course Lily Anilik, who wrote a biography of Eve and alongside of this. My publisher is taking Place Books is publishing two screenplays that Eve and I wrote together.

15:48Speaker 3:One was turned into a French movie called Envoy a Les v Alone and the other one remember Pearl Harbor, about Hollywood right after the Second World War. It's more of a Hollywood noir. We had a great time writing them, and I'm so glad that Sticking Placebooks publish them.

16:06Speaker 1:Let's talk about your writing. Do you have a routine? Do you eat before you sit down? Do you take breaks? How does food enter your working day?

16:15Speaker 3:Unfortunately I live within walking distance of a refrigerator.

16:18Speaker 2:But I'm pretty good about it now.

16:20Speaker 3:I you said, joked that my writing schedule was avoiding it as long as I could, until I couldn't do it anymore. Then I started writing, and I find great comfort in my relationship with my computer. And you said, be what I think a writer would take a break? Walk around the block. And now I take a break and I don't know, read the Huffington Post or listen to your podcast.

16:42Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm calling from the middle of London. And I walked into this meeting room that a friend hasn't led me in his restaurant, of all places, I'm talking to you from another person's restaurant, and she said, what is what are you carrying? What is that book? And I told her and she said, what a beautiful cover. And we don't tell a book by its cover. But I know that you are an art collector. I know that you have his sister as we both do as a painter.

17:09Speaker 1:We know that museums are your first stop in a city, and so it isn't surprising to me that you have this beautiful work of art on your cover. Tell me the process of choosing the cover of the book.

17:22Speaker 3:The cover was designed or made by Devorah Blom, who's done a series of beautiful portraits of Los Angeles. And we plan another edition, a hardcover where every chapter will include one of her drawings of Los Angeles. Yeah, so that was really lucky.

17:45Speaker 1:Find Benders la Is on seld Where and tell me how we can buy copies of this book.

17:52Speaker 3:You can get it from the publishers, Sticking Place books and I hope and bookstores in London.

18:02Speaker 1:It is and it's for sale, and it's for sale in the River Cafe, so you can have a meal and buy a book. The other question that we ask every guest at the end of the interview, and it will be my last question to you is what do you think Bender's comfort food would be? If Bender needed comfort, he would want to prepare or have prepared for him.

18:26Speaker 3:Bender would prepare it. He's got a big appetite and he likes to cook, so if he had the River Cafe cookbook in hand, he would make a comfort meal. It would start with ricotta al four note, then risotto con pizilli and pork cooked in milk. The dessert, he wouldn't tackle the chocolate nemesis or the caramel ice cream, so dessert would be a peach.

18:56Speaker 1:Thank you, Michael, and thank you Bender Benders written by Michael Elias and on sale now. I really tell you all of you listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, go and enjoy this book. Thank you Michael, Thank you.

19:20Speaker 3:Ruthie's Table Fur was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton, and Zad Rodgers with Andrew Sang and Bella Selina.

19:27Speaker 2:This has been an atomized production for iHeartMedia.