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

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. As a restaurant genius, I know the experience starts long before the food hits the table. Genius by Global Payments makes it easy. Digital menus and price updates in real time. No reprints, no surprises. The kitchen and floor stay perfectly in sync. So every dish arrives exactly as it should. From game day crowds to memorable meals. Big League reliability for any business. That's genius. This is Mandy Woodruff-Santos from Brown Ambition. When you think about discovering small brands, what store pops into your mind? Well, it should be Walmart. Seriously, Walmart has thousands of small brands, and they're all in one place.

0:48Just go online or in-store, discover, and shop. It could not be easier. Every one of these brands has a real story and real people behind it. They're true American success stories. And you can find them all at Walmart. Discover thousands of small brands at walmart.com today. Ruthie's Table 4 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 in a celebration of the way food connects us all. It's available now wherever you buy your books. Ruthie's Table 4 brought to you by Sky and Montclair.

1:56the right direction. Recently, though, our calls have been about one important thing. His book, Bender's LA, compelling and beautifully written. His hero is a comedy writer in the 1970s, 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 are. How are you? What's... By what? 6 ,000 miles. 6 ,000 miles, a few oceans, valleys. It's so good to be with you.

2:44It'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. Okay. This is about Bender in New York. In New York, Bender had 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.

3:26He 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 the 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 Mauler. They didn't care or even notice.

4:08They got by. Their apartment had a gas-refrigerated barred windows overlooking a field of junk and no sink in the bathroom, but Allen Ginsberg lived upstairs. They never ate in a restaurant that owned a La or Lay, but alternated between Ratner's and Max's with an occasional stop at the B &H or a fat egg roll at the entrance to the IRT on Astor Place. That's a beautiful reading. Tell me, really, how do you see what this book is about? It's the comic adventures or the journey of Bender. He's a writer who comes from the 70s Radical Theater of New York to work in Hollywood where he jogs with Burt Lancaster.

4:53He plays tennis with Abbie Hoffman. He hides a Weather Underground member from the FBI. 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 Eve Babbitt. He's got a really smart psychiatrist and a powerful agent, Neil Navitz. 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.

5:45Dantanas, the Palm, Amazon, Delicatestans. 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 character. He was a person I would love to have interviewed. What would he have told me about his life in food? Oh, Bender brought his appetite from New York to Los Angeles, that's for sure. He found in Langer's, as Nora Ephron's had the best pastrami in the world. He found the city, the suburbs of Los Angeles that had the best Chinese restaurants in the world.

6:30He 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 Ma Maison to Spago with Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton. And these were all, they transformed the appetite of Los Angeles. And they were, they made it exciting and they had no boundaries. 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 and Bender enjoyed it all. He did enjoy it all.

7:16How do you find the food culture in Los Angeles right now? I hate to use the word better, but I think it is. The restaurants are varied, as I said, and there are discoveries to be made all the time. and all of a sudden everybody's flocking to Glendale for the best Armenian restaurants or Westwood Boulevard with what we call 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.

7:57I hope so. reading the book myself and knowing the author very well, there is a sense of autobiographical in this novel. Did you ever think of writing it as a memoir instead of as a novel? 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. What was your life? Tell me about it. I came from New York and I had a background in radical theater in the New York off-Broadway scene, the living theater of a Mama Judson.

8:44As an actor or as a director? 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 comedy 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. What did you write? We first started writing variety shows. Glenn Campbell, Smothers Brothers, and Leslie Uggams.

9:25And then we transitioned from, we changed from variety shows, which died out, to sitcoms. And we wrote All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore. And then I teamed up with Rich Eustace and we created our own 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 in the last season was the teacher and the star of the show was Billy Connolly. And that was one of the best experiences in my life. He was brilliant, inventive, and it was great.

10:09I also wrote screenplays all during this time. And on one of the shows I worked with Steve Martin. We were both writers, but he was a writer 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. I just saw him. He's in London right now, filming Murders in the Building. So So he and Marty Short are here, and he talks so compellingly, really, about riding the jerk with you and the effect of that. And it's also interesting to think about how much comedy and what you were working in in terms of comedy when there was a kind of tumultuous political and social environment going on at that time, wasn't there?

11:01It was the Vietnam War in the 70s, and it divided Hollywood in a lot of ways. There were those who were against the war, Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland. There were the SDS, Tom Hayden, Black Panthers. It was a tumultuous time. And you also had John Wayne on the other side. And Nixon was president. And so Hollywood was a really interesting place at the time. Coming from the theater and comedy to writing television, we know about the parallels between your life and Benders. going from New York to Los Angeles. But tell me more about, as a writer, creating this character. Tell me more about Bender.

11:44Bender gets by. He misses New York. He comes to love Los Angeles and its own incredible art world with Ed Ruscha and Frank Romero, Patsy Valdez, Charles Garabedian. For Bender, I would say as he gets to know L.A., New York recedes. 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. Yes, he does. He does. He really prevails, I think. When I read it, it's so visual as well. Did you think about writing it as a movie? What compelled you to write this as a novel as a part from, say, a film? Raymond Chandler said, when you come to Hollywood, you're going to be a Hollywood writer.

12:32You 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. It's yours. And it could be a poem, an essay, a play, whatever. 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. Bender comes to L.A., but he does miss his New York.

13:14And so you've told us what it took to get used to a city where you have to drive everywhere, a city that was just called a city, but there was no there in many ways. Do you find that him missing New York, was that interesting to write for you? Did that feel very real to you? It's funny. At the time, I would hear people say, I miss 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 Subways. 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.

14:06I found myself driving freeways. L.A., it 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. Now we have neighborhoods that are labeled. We have a Filipino town. We have Koreatown. We have Japantown. We have Little Armenia. We have Little Tehran. And they have their restaurants, their bookstore. So it's an amazing place to live now. The way that this book does feel like it couldn't be written in any other city. It was also an ode to friendship in Los Angeles, which brings me to your friend and Bender's friend, based on Eve Babbitt's.

15:01Yes, I met Eve in New York when she was working for the East Village Other, and I was in the Living Theater. We met at a Salvador Dali opening, and we talked, and then she gave me her phone number and said, if you're ever in LA, call me. And I did. And that was the beginning of a 40-year friendship and a collaboration. And I'm a character in her books. And she became a character in my book. She's Mimi. And she's Bender's 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 When I arrived, she brought me into her family.

15:42And her father was a classical violinist. Her mother was an artist and her sister a designer. And it was great to arrive in Los Angeles and find a family. When you were writing about her, did it bring back a lot of the times that you had? It was revisiting our friendship. And she was an important part of my life and an important part of the L.A. literary scene. at the time and even more so now. And I think - Why do you say more so now? There's been a revival of her work thanks to her 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.

16:31I would say LA and they would say, oh, wow, do you know Eve Babbitt's? And I did. And also, of course, Lily Anerlik, who wrote a biography of Eve. And alongside of this, my publisher's Sticking Place Books is publishing two screenplays that Eve and I wrote together. One was turned into a French movie called Envoyé Les Violins. 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 Place books published them. Let's talk about your writing. Do you have a routine? Do you eat before you sit down?

17:16Do you take breaks? How does food enter your working day? Unfortunately, I live within walking distance of a refrigerator, but I'm pretty good about it now. I used to joke that my writing schedule was avoiding it as long as I could until I couldn't do it anymore, and I start writing. And I find great comfort in my relationship with my computer. And it used to be, 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. That's a good point. I'm calling from the middle of London. And I walked into this meeting room that a friend has led me in his restaurant.

17:55Of all places, I'm talking to you from another person's restaurant. And she said, 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 a sister, as we both do, who's a painter. 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. The cover was designed or made by Deborah Blum, who's done a series of beautiful portraits of Los Angeles.

18:35And we plan another edition, a hardcover, where every chapter will include one of her drawings of Los Angeles. Yeah, so that was really a lucky find. Benders LA is on sale. Where, and tell me how, we can buy copies of this book. It's first up is Amazon, of course, and you can also get it from the publisher Sticking Place Books, and I hope it's in bookstores in London. It is, 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?

19:29If Bender needed comfort, he would want to prepare or have prepared for him. 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 forno, then risotto con pisilli, and pork cooked in milk. For dessert, he wouldn't tackle the chocolate nemesis or the caramel ice cream. So dessert would be a peach. Thank you, Michael. And thank you, Bender. Bender's LA, 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.

20:21Thank you, Michael. Thank you.

20:29Ruthie's Table 4 was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton and Zad Rogers with Andrew Sang and Bella Salini. This has been an Atomize production for iHeart Media.

20:43From game day crowds to memorable meals, Genius by Global Payments keeps your kitchen and floor perfectly in sync. Real-time menus, seamless updates, big league reliability for any business. That's Genius. This is Mandy Woodruff-Santos from Brown Ambition. When you think about discovering small brands, what store pops into your mind? Well, it should be Walmart. Seriously, Walmart has thousands of small brands and they're all in one place. Just go online or in-store, discover and shop. It could not be easier. Every one of these brands has a real story and real people behind it. They're true American success stories.

21:23And you can find them all at Walmart. Discover thousands of small brands at Walmart.com today. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.