George Lemperis` spatula screeched to a dead halt. Three eggs over easy never made it over.
Louie Varga`s fork stopped cold. A clump of scrambled eggs, precariously impaled, plummeted to the plate.
Jacky Rezabek, sinking her solitary top tooth into rye toast, smeared light, just stared. She didn`t even pretend to chew.
Robin Leach, oblivious to the freeze frame all around him, swung his Santoni suede loafer, a mosaic of olive, rust and tomato-tinted animal hide, over the ripped orange vinyl of the stool. He settled his ample haunches on the dented chrome rim, fourth from the end of the counter, and took a look around the Palace Grill, 1408 W. Madison St.
There is nothing rich and famous about the Palace, one of the few joints still breathing along a stretch of West Madison declared dead a couple decades back. It`s close enough to the Chicago Stadium to be a regular filling station for the Blackhawks, both players and front office. And it`s greasy enough to count among its regulars the mayor`s brother Bill, cops of every stripe, and assorted ”millionaires, bums and hookers,” according to Lemperis, the proprietor.
A pink-and-aqua neon sign glowing over the door lets you know you`re there. Otherwise you`d drive right by the squat gray-brick box built during World War II from used military parts.
”Good morning,” crowed Leach to the regulars, some so deep in their morning papers they hadn`t looked up to see the interloper.
”Good morning. This is quite a surprise,” Lemperis crowed back, sweat beaded across his brow.
Lemperis does double-duty in the linoleum alley that runs behind the 19-stool counter, where a half-century of elbows have worn grooves into the counter`s pre-Formica edge. Facing north, Lemperis works the grill. South, he takes orders, keeps the coffee coming and passes out plates of eggs, bacon, toast and hashbrowns the way they deal hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds at Caesars Palace, no relation, in Las Vegas.
”This is quite a surprise for me, too,” said Leach, gulping. He hadn`t expected to be belly-up to a bar, albeit one that serves its high-octane in white ceramic cups without so much as a saucer, so early in the morning.
”This is where the rich and famous eat and dine,” shouted Varga, a Blackhawks` trainer, the forkful of eggs having found its way back to his fully occupied mouth.
”Eat and what?” asked Leach, his squirrel`s-tail eyebrows aiming for the hairline he claims is stuck in reverse. He`d mistaken Varga`s mumbling for an early warning that to dine at the Palace was to sink one`s teeth into one`s demise.
”This is a real celebrity,” declared Varga, alerting the rest of the counter crew to look up from their crossword puzzles, their comics and their horoscopes.
”No, I`m just a working stiff,” Leach bellowed back, grinding his consonants like smoldering butts into an ashtray.
On the road again
On his way to the Palace, bouncing over Chicago potholes in the front seat of a not-so-rich-and-famous Toyota Corolla, the voice that comes out in Fleet Street screaming headlines had been complaining that he`s a ”fugitive in the first class lounge.” The voice, of course, belongs to the producer and host of the 10-season-old ”Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” the panting paean to fame and fortune that`s sponged up by 5.4 million viewers in 185 U.S. markets and 24 foreign countries each week.
He`s on the road about 300 days a year, he`d been saying, and never gets to slumber in the classy boudoirs his cameras take you through; he checks into whatever`s cheaper down the lane. He does, however, insist on one concession to the high life: ”I like to have a good champagne chilling when I arrive.” Because he finds dual-time zone watches ”so ostentatious,” he wears two gold Omega watches; the one on his left wrist is always set to New York time, the one on his right, whatever time zone in which he is currently ticking. ”It`s a grind. It`s a grind that never ends,” he sighed.
Grinding his way through Chicago last week, a 24-hour stop on a 15-day book tour that left his right hand limp from penning ”Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams! Robin Leach!” at a clip of 165 an hour, Leach carried to the Palace a copy of his very glossy ”The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook.” Riffling through its 280 pages is a romp through the recipe files of Mrs. Larry Fortensky (you know, Michael Jackson`s gal friend, Liz), the former Mrs. Donald Trump and Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, Rita Hayworth`s daughter.
The table of contents reads like a Palm Beach matron`s list of things to pick up from the market: lobster bouillon, lobster salad, lobster tail and shrimp flambe, truffle consomme, terrine of foie gras, caviar with classic garniture (but of course), braised rabbit, quail with port sauce, pasta a la Passion for Regis, place card cookies, pistachio cake and, imagine this, strawberries Heston.
Leach plunked his highbrow kitchen guide on the Palace`s countertop, where it promptly got a lowbrow blessing of grease from an errant hashbrown.
Famous in its own way
”They don`t have a place like this in Beverly Hills,” shouted Lemperis, who had regained his bravado and, chest puffed, sauntered over to where Leach had planted his elbows.
Lemperis was not about to have Leach thinking he`d wandered into Nowhere. Staking his claim to culinary infamy, Lemperis laid down this: ”They offered John Gacy life imprisonment or eat at the Palace for a year, he took the jail.”
Varga, leaping into a countertop game of Pile-It-High-and-Deep, volunteered this: ”I came here because Dillinger ate here. Al Capone, too.” At last, simple truth from Don Niederkorn, trainer with the Indianapolis Ice, the Blackhawks` top minor-league affiliate: ”I come here because each week I get to take home the hambone to my dog.”
Enough messin` around. There was eating to attend to.
”Would you like a Denver omelet, Mr. Leach?” asked Lemperis, back at the grill.
”What`s in it?” asked the rich and famous one.
”Ham, green pepper, tomato, onion and cheese,” Lemperis yelled over his shoulder.
”You got it. Only half that size,” Leach said pointing to a Denver down the counter that could have doubled as a doorstop for the Taj Mahal. Out of the side of his mouth, Leach whispered: ”See, these are the places that make America great.”
The real story
You would not think Mr. Rich-and-Famous would take so keenly to the counter culture. ”You`d expect me to be a fish out of water,” says the millionaire who counts among his real-estate holdings: a three-bedroom home with Jacuzzi, sauna and sunken living room in Connecticut; a newly built waterfront home in Antigua, West Indies; and an apartment in New York he claims is nothing more than a ”very large closet where I change my clothes for trips.” (Note: Leach would never be a candidate for his own show; they have a cutoff of $50 million in assets. He doesn`t come close, he says.)
”People have this image that I sleep in a tuxedo.” In fact? ”I sleep in nothing.” Well, thank you, Mr. Leach, for clearing up that little misconception. We feel so much, er, closer now. ”People expect me to have a glass of champagne in my hand when actually I drink decaf out of a cup without a saucer.”
Speaking of that, he shouted over to Lemperis: ”You must make a fortune saving on saucers!” Everyone in the joint cracked up. One guy laughed so hard he spit out a blast of coffee. This Leach was rather a hoot, after all.
Leach, born 51 years ago in Harrow, England, 18 miles from London`s Fleet Street, the son of a Hoover vacuum sales manager and a homemaker, never set out to earn his keep snooping between silk sheets and barging into the bubble baths of the Who`s Who of World Wealth.
It just happened. Here`s how, much abbreviated: A mere lad of 15, he got a job muckraking for the Harrow Observer, his hometown broadsheet. His beat:
garden shows. ”I`d go to find the largest cabbage or the biggest squash or the yellowest yellow corn,” anything to keep himself awake, recalled Leach, suggesting the seed of his insatiable search for superlatives. ”I knew everybody loved to read about the largest, the biggest, the best, no matter what it was.”
Fast-forward to 1983, skipping over stints at London`s Daily Mail;
Manhattan`s Lord & Taylor (he sold shoes for 2 1/2 months, using his lunch hour to run resumes around town); the New York Daily News (his lunchtime panting landed him a job on the night desk where he lasted five months before being fired, he says, for refusing to leave the scene of a story at the end of his shift); Rupert Murdoch`s Star; bicoastal TV stations (his buddy Regis Philbin asked him to go on Philbin`s show and gossip); CNN`s ”People Tonight”; and, finally, ”Entertainment Tonight.”
”I became frustrated,” said Leach, draining his saucer-less cup of decaf. ”We`d go into these houses and we`d talk to these blond-headed bimbos who`d talk about how they wanted to stretch by doing Shakespeare-in-the-park. They were nothing more than jiggle queens and I`d say to myself, `I don`t want to see anything more than you taking your clothes off and stepping into the bubble bath.` From that gem of facetiousness came a TV show.”
A taste of West Madison
The morsel made him hungry.
”How`s that Denver omelet doing?” he shouted in the general direction of the grill. Lemperis spun on his rubber soles and shouted back, ”You know you`d make a great fill-in for that rich-and-famous show.” He punctuated his little yolk by laying before Leach what might have been called, screechingly, The World`s Most Overwhelming Omelet!
”This is a mountain!” exclaimed the man some claim can`t say anything without a shout.
”Eat what you can,” Lemperis said, sounding like someone`s mother instead of someone`s short-order cook.
Sinking his fork deep into the ooze of the omelet, its tines disappearing in a three-inch drift of pure cholesterol, Leach let loose: ”See, this is the food that made America great! None of that wishy-washy foreign stuff that looks like a fried frog`s leg! You wouldn`t find an interior decorator eating this!” He chewed. He swallowed. He beamed.
Moving on to a side order of toast-two thick slabs of buttered sesame bread-he offered this: ”You could build a house with these! It`s like a brick!”
We wondered, Does Mr. Leach dream in exclamation marks?
”There are two Robin Leaches,” he said, shoving away the side of buttered bricks. ”There`s the Robin Leach, the business man, who knows what it takes to get the job done, and does it. And then there`s this cartoon character who I send out to work and scream and rant and rave.” In real life, the cartoon Leach is kept locked in a cel. And don`t count on hearing ”that expression” either. That expression, the one about the fizzy wishes and fish- egg dreams, he guesses he`s shouted at least 300 times on air in the almost 200 episodes of ”Lifestyles.”
There was so much more to talk about, but Leach checked the watch on his right wrist, the one that said it was time to go, Chicago time. There were books to sign, and overstuffed omelets to digest.
Lemperis had one last something for Leach. He reached in his apron pocket and pulled out a shiny packet: Rolaids.
Shouted Varga from behind his empty plate: ”Around here, we call those Life Savers.”
